


a screen in the divided room

by transversely



Category: Mugen no Juunin | Blade of the Immortal
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We were all children together once, that is all." She started pulling apart the bandages again. "And now we are not together, nor children."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. winter sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/gifts).



> for one of my very dearest fandom friends, who will know the second she sees this that there is no point anonymizing and therefore i may as well say: it was an absolute delight to be able to write this for you, even if i had to engage in egregious lies in the process to stake you out for espionage purposes (i am very sorry, but payback for the last exchange!! and you were indeed helpful in puzzling over an attempted treat). i can hardly think of anyone with whom i have more fun losing my mind over--among many things--girl heroines with no off switch, the maddening necessity of fixit for certain canons whose creators just did not give a fuck, and extremely specific iterations of postcanon genrefuck ghost stories. 
> 
> and so, please enjoy the first part of an increasingly overinvested ode to all of the above, and how much you have influenced my take on all of them. thank you for introducing me to this PIECE OF GARBAGE canon, and now as you can see, i'm in it for the long haul.
> 
> HAPPY YULETIDE SENRI! and thank you most of all, for your (unwitting) support!

 

 

 

 

 

~ 

 

 

 

 

Ten days after the ship at Hitachi and five before the reconstruction began, she received a letter from Doa in a gleefully deliberate hatchet job of formal calligraphy: 

_MY dEAR rIN, i have practic ed cALLIgRAPHY as you sEE. I WAS sendin g you poTAToes and the drAWing I maDe. this helps me not Fighting. thEY are DRawings of HOME, knifes, people I CUt in The oLD dAY, and yyou!_

_toshu cCAMe to sEE us. he saID, the sEA in wintr is BEAutiful._

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She wrapped herself in a robe and went outside to look at the two swordlengths of ground between the courtyard steps and the dark entrance to the dojo. The soil was dry and papery like moths’ wings where she and the moonlight touched it. She was sifting it through her fingers little by little, thinking, when she heard a clunk, clunk noise from the northernmost gate and went to the entrance to find a girl splitting the doorjamb to pieces with a beautiful side-swing.   

The girl shouted, “Please forgive my negligence, but I am almost finished!” She wiped her brow. She had no thumb and two bullet holes in the back of her hand.

There was nothing to be done about it. Rin kicked at the sod floor where the builders hadn’t yet laid down hardwood and considered her options.

“That looks very painful,” she tried.

“Oh, no!” cried the ghost. “Ojo-san! Please don’t spend your valuable concern on me! A few callouses here, see, and the axe handle feels just like a baby’s rattle! Well, it hurts, but that's how you know you're _alive!_ ” There were bullet holes in her throat, shining like beetles. She was in soft reconnaissance clothes and one of the holes had gone right through the mesh lining over her heart. There was a slight bamboo-grove whistling which turned out to be the wind through her exposed ribcage.

“I could never quite get the hang of that,” admitted Rin.

“I would absolutely take it upon myself to show you, ojo-san, if I didn’t have someplace to be! And all of this to chop to kindling first.” She indicated Rin’s doorjamb split to angular planks at her feet. “But—if you please! Maybe I might trouble you to let a humble woodcutter know who lives here?”

That, thought Rin, was a very good question.

“You know, I don’t know,” she said. “Not really.”

“Well, it’s a shame! All this dust, of course they’d be in want of an odd-jobs girl. I could be of service any which way. Are you versatile, ojo-san? I honor my upbringing by being versatile!”

“I,” said Rin, “Well, I suppose.”

“Please say it proudly, then!”

It was welling up already, blood from a minor cut and about as embarrassing. “I honor my upbringing by being versatile!” she yelled.

For such a serious ghost she really had a very charming laugh, thought Rin, and the next moment hated herself.

“Someone taught me that,” said the ghost. “Someone I didn’t expect. Maybe you know.”

The spring night was cold and remote. There were a few stars, blown wide against their field of vision, but set far apart and so subtle to the sightline that finding them was like chasing the sound of windchimes. Rin huddled, didn’t answer. She watched her execute that long, languid side-swing a little more. Its explosiveness only in the moment before the blade bit into the knots. Then she said, “I’m—trying to build a—wall. But I don’t think the soil is very good for laying a foundation. Could you—would you mind—”

In the courtyard, the woodcutter pushed three fingers knuckle deep into the soil and hummed at the back of her teeth. “My father’s house looked like this,” she confessed cheerfully. “A beautiful shoin-zukuri house. Though I never saw it. But I am sure that it did. A wall, through such a terribly comely courtyard?”

“I can see the old dojo entrance,” said Rin. “From wherever I stand.” The ghost was watching her courteously so she hunched her shoulders, and said, “Someone—came here once. And stood in that doorway with his back to us, as if he was our  _honored_ guest, as if—look. I brought my parents’ sword home. All I want to see when I stand here is what we have. What we still have.”

The ghost didn’t lower her dark, lightless eyes.

“A little charcoal will ready your soil to build,” she said. “All there is to do is burn it fresh.”

They brought the rough planks from the doorjamb in from the garden and piled them in the courtyard forming a haphazard character on the ground. Under the mildew of old paint, the vegetal bite of cedar, and below that lime where the wood had initially been treated to gird the first iteration of her home. They worked quickly, sloughing the dampness from their hands on their clothes. In Rin’s chest she felt a flickering fluttering as though her heart was there, under the ghost’s cupped palm where she struck a match on her steel shoulderplate and then lit the fire in the heart of the woodpile.

“Let it burn until morning.”

“Morning? But—I’m sure I’ll fall asleep! Won’t you stay with me?”

“No, ojo-san. I was too early, and now I am too late.”

“But the the house…! I wouldn’t—if the house burned down…”

“Ojo-san!” The ghost was opening and closing her eyes very fast. “This is something I never thought about! An outrage—the house burning down!”

Silvery quick she snatched one of the steel plates from her shoulders and cast it onto the pile. The flame skittered snakelike up the metal arch and disappeared into the curve of her lifeline. Her nails lit up like mother-of-pearl as she detached another, and then another, from her shoulders, from her elbows and gauntlets, from her knees, and finally she offered her back to Rin, wordlessly, and Rin saw the steel trident insignia between her shoulderblades.

The moment she touched it a soft blackness expanded across the ghost’s skin so quickly it swallowed up the bullet holes, the serious mouth with its earnest laugh, the calloused hands that had protected her from the hard axe-handle and a harder life. Rin turned to toss the piece onto the fire and when she looked back there was nothing there but the axe, cockeyed in the dirt.

An exhaustion she hadn’t felt since she was a child knocked her feet out from under her. When her eyes flew open again the daylight was breaking; she was up to her ankles in a sweet-scented ash, her garden overrun with it from her sandals to the stones at its edge: charcoal the color of the leaden winter sky, its mirrored density, the lengths of ground now in her name under a field of silver dust unrecognizable as the moon.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She went to see Hyakurin and the Itto-Ryu’s wounded ace. Before she went she put Doa’s letter in her satchel and then ran back two shopfronts to leave it at home. On reflection she buried it in the garden, under the charcoal, and stubbornly didn’t think about anything taking root. 

When she got to Hyakurin’s house Makie was there, swaddled in her bandages and with her head held steady in a brace. This she craned her neck out of to peer at Rin’s grimy hands, and then she smiled.

“Courtyard…work,” seethed Rin, “I’m, if you don’t know—I’m renovating my family’s house. It’s just—in the eastern quarter of town, outside, um, Minato. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there or if you just spent your time, kind of, kind of living in that shack where we met you in—never mind.”

“A very lovely house,” said Hyakurin loyally.

“I have no doubt!” said Makie. “Even this house is very lovely, as it were.” 

“Sweetheart, you’re fucked up twenty ways to Suwa, but you’re not  _concussed,"_  said Hyakurin, “which, by the way, is the only thing that’s  _not_ going on with you at the moment—it’s a warehouse. You’ve been chained to a storeroom wall so you don’t make a break.  _Very lovely—_ like the Shogun’s pasty  _ass_.”

Makie was doing something intensely disturbing where she pulled apart her bandages, peered into the bullet wounds, some partially gangrenous, and smiled beatifically as though coming into contact with esoteric secrets of the universe in this process. “Indeed…you are not wrong. I have never stayed in such an unpleasant place.”

“Say that again!” exploded Hyakurin. “It may be a dump, but it’s  _my_ house, you ungrateful—“

“Hyaku-san,” said Rin, “could I—could I talk to Makie-san for a moment?”

At the time—at that time—she had disengaged the dagger from his rib cage and pulled back and that was when something trailing blood had shot past her, streaking down the dock losing ribbons of shredded cloth and hurtling over the edge into the sea after him. They hadn’t dredged him up but it took another few minutes to retrieve Makie, who had fainted at first contact with the saltwater in her bullet wounds.

They’d taken her back to Edo in chains and blankets, variable order, one around the other depending on what echelon of bureaucracy her jailor hailed from, but on the road she didn’t notice either and by the time Rin got to see her she was sitting pretty in both, docile as you please with the fingers of her gloves sewn shut to prevent her from picking her bandages open. She’d smiled at Rin, offered an apology that she couldn’t bow, as it had been so long. Then she’d said—quite conversationally: “And where is he?”

Now she stopped fiddling with the bandages and tucked them out of place under her wrists, presumably out of courtesy at Rin’s attempts not to gag.

“Renovating a house,” she said. “It’s quite some responsibility to take on.”

“No more so than anything else I’ve done.” Or haven’t done. As it were. 

“So he told me. It is more than I could do in the service of something similar I intended, once.” Makie was rewrapping one of the bandages like wrap tape for a fight. "Well...you saved my life, my dear girl, so now, I also have a responsibility...to validate your decision..."

"Um..." There was no way to respond to this, much less with what she’d come to say.  She tucked her hair behind her ears in panicked selfconsciousness, shook it out again.

“Hyaku-san is really nice, you know!” Her knees were already beginning to hurt in seiza at the edge of the tatami. “She took you in so you wouldn’t have to stay at a machi-bugyo hospital, and  _they’re_ terrible, take it from me, that’s what they were calling that  _jail_ they kept Manji and Isaku in. It’s lucky you’re here with her instead! You shouldn’t tease her by agreeing with everything she says.”

“I am not teasing her. I genuinely agree with everything she says.”

“And Makie-san, she says you haven't even been sleeping, you  _definitely_ shouldn’t—wait, er—really?”

“Is that so surprising?” The bandages covered the bullet holes in her body. It was nothing like the ghost in Rin’s garden, with her gaping wounds gone unnoticed. Everyone had seen Makie’s wounds. Everyone knew why she was here.

Now she propped herself onto her elbows, shoulders swallowing up her lovely, tilted throat, “As you may deduce from my captivity, I am a fairly agreeable person.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. Also, as it happens, she reminds me of someone.”

“You—should we call them? To see you?”

“No. We were all children together once, that is all.” She started pulling apart the bandages again. “And now we are not together, nor children.” She turned over and waved to Hyakurin, skulking near the doorway, in a picturesque fashion as though regaling her from a boat. "I wish I had my shamisen..."

This seemed alarmingly poignant. "Oh! Do you—should I ask Hyaku-san to get one for you?"

"No. She confiscated it after I sang her a ballad of my own composition. Its theme was the futility of dreams in this world."

"I...see. Should I...get it back?"

Makie seemed charmed. "No, no. What a dear girl. I did not truly enjoy it. As with many things, my own talent caused me to despair and tire of it..."

It was all getting surreal. She couldn’t come to ask it and then not ask it. The letter with what Makie couldn’t have known, buried in the garden, but here she was, and—she had to ask. “Makie-san. Did you—think he was alive? Was that why you went into the water?”

Her elbows folded up, like the inverted knees of a bird; she lay her head back down. Hyakurin had sprinkled rice around her pillow the way you did for geisha, so they’d keep their head straight and avoid ruining their hairstyles. There wasn’t a single grain in Makie’s hair now.

“I did not think anything,” she said. “I saw an opportunity, I went without thinking. No matter what happens. That is how a swordswoman moves.”

“I’m afraid I don’t—know what you’re talking about.“

“I asked you long before, the first time we met.” She turned over burrowing her cheek in the reed of the mat. A silence came down between them, private as a screen. “Then, you did.”

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

 _toshu cCAMe to sEE us. he saID, the sEA in wintr is BEAutiful_.

If he were alive—

No. No.

She had burned the ground fresh. She had asked the ghost to do it.

She was waiting. Soon a wall would go up. There was going to be a wall.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They had been going up one of the lower side-trails of Haku-san and she’d seen him double over with a cramp next to a creekbed clotted with the velvety lilies common to the area. She had yelled to stop so she could cut another walking-stick for herself. He’d scoffed at her and went to lie on his elbows by the creek. In a habit that had disgusted her on sight he scooped up a handful of the cool mud to make a plaster for his fever.

It was early sunset. They’d been able to see the small Kaga hamlet surrounding the Kenrokuen, visible here and there in chiaoscuro as they embroidered a trail through the trees. Its whitewashed walls visible against street stalls already dark so they could only estimate at the geography, what business people who had nothing to do with them might conduct there, untouched by the urgency of their escape. With that shedding of extraneities they came higher into purer air and for once it didn't feel the way it always did, the world leaving her behind.

The cold wrapped closer like wading in water. As the land sloped up these little towns too fell away, and every time it happened she remembered how far she was from home.

A raspy coughing sound brought her back from the edge of her thoughts and she went to go prop him up so he didn’t anticlimactically strangle himself and die. He was mumbling to himself telling a story. When she ducked her head to listen he glared at her and tried to turn away.

“Fine, suit yourself,” she said. “Mutter away like an old man, see if I care—“

“ _Don’t_ call me that!”

It surprised them both. They stared at each other; they looked away. Rin wrung out the edge of her sleeve.

“If you’re going to sit there—“ she tried again, “if you’re going to just  _lie_ there, like an—like an—an aqua  _slug_ —I’m going to go astride the trail a little way.”

“Why?”

She pointed through the trees to the hamlet. “We passed the Kenrokuen about midday. There’s a well here somewhere, where this peasant farmer once found some gold dust while washing some sweet potatoes from Haku-san—”

“You find that enjoyable? Something that happened before you were born?”

“Excuse me? Is there a problem with that?”

“It is not something I understand, so I asked you.”

“It—that isn’t the point.” It had startled her, that was all. “Don’t you know the story?” 

“I know the story.”

She hadn’t actually expected it and kicked the loose dirt at her feet in consternation. “What, you stopped for storytime in the middle of your busy lifestyle of murdering and pillaging?”

He took a cloth out of his satchel and wiped the mud plaster away. His hair was stuck in his headdress, getting muddier; she considered it mutely for a moment, then reached out and disentangled it. His skin burned along the meat of her palm.

“Someone I knew worked the fields once. He was homesick often. We did have  _storytime_ —as it were.”

Rin put the cloth in her satchel. “That is unhygenic,” Anotsu muttered, and wilted against the tree.  The axe lay next to him in the dirt catching and holding the sunset.

There were bars of tangerine light on both their faces. Laddering into the forest and up to the peak of Haku-san that glowed beaconlike in the distance. She thought of the story; the gold dust in the pan of clear water like what they’d doused their waterskins in on the way up, bitter and tasting too strongly of some kind of mineral. How it must have looked and felt to the fingers, and the moment of panic before realizing what it was but Kaga and the land had immortalized the moment of discovery anyway, claimed that man’s small triumph for its own.

“Where is he,” she said. “The—one who worked the fields. You killed him? His family?”

“Gone. He will not come back.”

“Oh.”

One of the bars of light was in his eyes. It seemed to bother him and he winced turning his head away, putting his hand up. So weak. She could put the cool cloth on his face again and it would give him relief. She could put it around his neck and pull it taut.

“Well,” she said, and stopped. “Well, it was probably your fault.”

He laughed. It sounded like he was choking. She snatched up her waterskin and took it to him dribbling the cloth a little, then a little more. She’d seen her mother feed kittens the same way. It made her feel weak herself, enough that she left the cloth in his fingers and knelt against the tree on the other side, closing her eyes.

When she opened them he was getting to his feet and tying the axe around his torso with one of her obi that he’d repurposed as a makeshift bandolier. His trembling fingers hefting and situating the knot. She watched, and then she stopped.

“What are you doing?”

“If you can find the well before the sun sets,” he said, “we won’t lose any time. Take the higher path.”

“You're—" she realized it as she said it, "— _interested._ "

"Why should that be so strange? If you are."

"You want to see it! You want to see if it's real!"

He considered. “So I do.”

They took the higher path, closing in from either side on a trail that was the bleached color of fine ocean gravel and felt like bone on her feet. They hadn’t found the well but they came upon a clearing of open grass where there had been a signal tower once and now was only a burned-down ground as though people had sought this spot out for bonfires. The grass there was a tea-colored thatch and shirred like silk. They had knelt at the same unbidden moment to touch it and she remembered his face: the eyes, hooded with the same color.

"Will it settle you?" he'd called. "Returning home. Remaking your life with what you wanted."

She put her hand in her hair against the night wind coming on, chopping around her like shallow waves. She thought about it.

"You tell me," she said. "Aren't you further along than I am?"

When the cold look went out of his eyes they were known to her. The curiosity beating there same as her own. She had wondered suddenly if it were the first time he, too, had ever traveled to another han. Had seen all of this for the first time. Held in his glance she was conscious of the earth beneath with its hidden gold, all the stored heat of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She had planned to spend all the nights in the grand bedroom where her parents had spent theirs, proper for the mistress of the Asano dojo, but for the past fortnight she’d picked up a habit of padding out to the edge of the courtyard where the ghost had visited her, and there she often fell asleep. In Hyakurin's house Makie was still jolting awake restless, but she, Rin, was ready for ghosts. If someone was a ghost, it meant they were dead.

Sometimes you wanted to see your dead. To inter them. To establish yourself apart from them. 

She dreamt of what it meant to be old. Her parents hadn’t been, her father’s students hadn’t been close. The closest she remembered was Abayama’s watchful eye at Anotsu’s back—that awful sea-green yukata—and after that Habaki stonefaced over his daughter, a girl whose face Rin hadn’t seen; to her bemusement Manji when he used to ask for unfashionable kinds of comfit years out of fashion, geezer type flavors made with linseed and anise. Makie leaning over Hyakurin’s washbasin would periodically speak of an old father and Hyakurin’s fingers on her hair would go gentle and fearful when she did. Master Sori in his stylish cut-piece yukata walked the streets with his paintings tied with whatever came to hand, cloth, twine, rope, chain, and no one thought to apply the moniker to him.

Perhaps there had been old men at the peripheries of most of their stories. Not hers, surely.

His anger, separated from her by time, went clearer like the landscape of the Kaga mountainside seen from its great height. With enough time to do so now—the rest of her life—she held it pooled in the decanter of her memory, swilled its surface looking for the ripple that had struck her. She wouldn’t have called him that if she’d met him now.

Then, one morning, she broke awake with a crick in her neck and there was a screen springing out of the ground where she’d stood on the night they’d burned the door down. About knee height. From where she was lying down it covered her field of vision with a dull white glow like moonlight.

It cleaved the courtyard in half. She'd gotten what she'd asked for and couldn’t see the far dojo entrance at all. Here was something she hadn't seen, in all the nights of traveling: her home, reclaimed.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

There were enough people at the market that her aimlessness could be camoflaged as some more dense, pigmented iteration of what it was. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation to float after so many years of fighting forward through iron tide. She picked her way through the crowd. She bought dried apricots for herself. She bought some matcha to go with them, wrong for the season, too cold. She bought a length of cloth she didn’t have any plans for yet but surely would. Perhaps she would make a canopy out of it, for the top of the tokonoma alcove. 

“Not gonna flatter your complexion,” someone said, “maybe something a little redder? I dunno, always been shit at the seasonal…color thing.” She looked over her shoulder and saw Magatsu squinting at the brocade. When she glared at him he bobbed the impatient peasant bow he’d always had and went splotchy pink.

“You!” she said, and then, “I don’t like red.”

“Suit yourself.”

“And this color would look fine on me! Look, with an underrobe of—“ she considered “…m…aybe red. I’m not—saying I’m going to get it, though. I’m just keeping the possibility open. It may or may not even have anything to do with you, though I appreciate your…cultural…experiment.”

He held up his hands in surrender. The metallic sunlight flickered from behind a cloud; she shaded her eyes and noticed he wasn’t wearing the stupid mask. It wasn’t flattering. He had a mouth so extraordinarily sulky it was impossible to take him seriously after seeing it. Mock me, that mouth said. Make me do menial chores for you. She took it up on the offer, made a decision, slung her basket over his forearm.

He followed her. She guessed rather uncharitably that he hadn't been made for it after all, following.

“Did you—“ she was going to ask if he wanted some of the matcha, which she was now unable to drink. She was shivering all over. “Did you go to see Makie-san?”

“I work out in the fields now. What makes you think she’s in need of a farmer? Odd jobs, on the other hand, she’s never had a head for—carpentry, maybe—”

“Please don’t do that! You don't—you don't have the right.”

He didn't wince, and this told her that he knew. He held her gaze for a long, lucid moment and then he turned away again and she realized her hands were full of things she didn't understand the use for anymore. “Sorry, sorry. We didn’t see much of each other near the end anyway.”

“Really?”

“Kinda conservation of resources? When Makie’s around, not a lot a beat-up country boy’s gonna be able to do for you,  is there?” He picked up a lacquered tray and put it back down again in apparent horror when it clacked forebodingly. In a setting like this he looked so ill at ease it was impossible to bring him to mind kneeling down in that graveyard, pulling his mask down to hiss at her to keep a tight lid on any antics. She found this vaguely unfair.

"A  _beat-up country boy_? Is that how you live with yourself after doing all those horrible—in fact, I won't dignify them by calling them horrible, though they were—all those  _ridiculous_ things!?"

He reared back, affronted. "Well, beg  _your_ pardon, sweetheart, but who was it exactly who got us tied up with those frankly psychotic government—"

"They were after you to begin with because of that man's  _stupid_ philosophical  _ravings_! Don't call yourself a beat-up country boy! Just leave it at beat-up, because that's all  _I_ remember!"

He was still following her, angrily rearranging the things in her basket to make room for a sheaf of scallions she shoved into his chest. These he shook the water from before bundling them expertly into the basket. "You'd better watch it, woman," he said darkly, "I've got a real short fuse these days, and in my time I've been known for many a—what? Look, I can't tell if you're complimenting me, but, I guess, thanks—"

“The point is," shrieked Rin, " _I_  saw Makie-san, and I got the impression she would have liked to see you! You know, since—“ She stopped. It occurred to her with a frisson of horror that she didn’t know if he knew. “…Since someone you know—“

The sulky mouth inverted itself. He was grinning. She remembered how Manji had always called him ‘kid,’ rucked up that preposterous hair; she’d assumed it had something to do with Manji being an old curmudgeon as she did for most proclivities of Manji’s but now she saw them: the lines of youth. Like the punched-out paper figures  people made at the new year, setting them alight with their hopes.

“Nice try, Rin." 

“S…sorry.”

“Are you?”

She gave it the thought it deserved, and the answer. “I would…like to be. I guess.”

“Much obliged, you’re gonna make a regular charity case out of me. It’s a little, what’d he call it, e _mo_ tionally ma _nip_ ulative to make it hard to stay angry at a—“ 

“Are  _you_?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Angry.”

He whistled tonelessly for a few moments. She looked at him, the sun filamenting the edges of his hair; she thought she’d prefer to remember him that way, his face as uncertain as she felt as it decided how to look. Was this how he’d looked, when he had told Anotsu the story about the well?  

Instead of answering her, he said, “You heading back to some flea-infested inn with Manji?”

“N…no, actually, we’ve—parted ways. When I’m in town I live at my family’s—my house. The old—“ she looked at the cloth in her basket, thought of the folded-up interior design plan with its space for the tokonoma, the seating area, the low tables for guests, the wall most of all, the dividing line between where they had come and what they hadn’t yet taken. The things she had held in herself since starting out on the road, and now she poured these things into her mind very gently, one at a time, until she felt the peace clack into place like the movement of a deer-chaser. “The new mutenichi-ryu dojo.”

“Got it,” said Magatsu, “Well. Lady of the house. That’s sweet, that’s. That’s pretty sharp. Looks well on ya.”

“Thank you. I’m sure you don’t mean that.”

He scratched his neck. “No,” he said dully, “can’t say I do.”

The screen was coming down again, the paper-thin silence there had been with Makie. Rin bit her lip.

“Would you—would you walk me home? If you don’t have, um, a previous engagement?”

“ _Me_?”

“I might—have an odd job. You know…carpentry.” She pulled a braid over her shoulder fretfully. “Please come, after all, you—you do know where it is.”

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They went by way of the planked paths from the market over the barley fields in the easternmost quarter. The sun had flickered so tensely, now put itself out behind a cloud. Long and violet flung out like banners their shadows avoided one another on the ground.

At her home, he stopped to toe off his sandals and clap them together once loudly as if entering consecrated ground, probably some custom from his rural upbringing; she thought that she respected that, an old custom. She couldn’t remember if he’d done it the first—time—or if she’d only been too young to watch for it. 

In the two days since the screen had taken root it’d grown larger than any real screen would have been and cut through the courtyard like the prow of a ship. There were no joins where the planks had separated and grown into finger-sized crossbeams. The hinges were wooden. The knots had peeled off to form oiled grooves and on the floor she could see them curled small and larval where they’d fallen. The wood had retained the silvery glow of the charcoal.

“I don’t want to break it,” said Rin, “it’s, um—but surely it folds? That’s what I don’t understand, there are hinges, but it doesn’t fold.”  

Magatsu said “tsk!” and went behind the screen on the other side of the courtyard. Rin sat down and dangled her feet. She put her chin in her hands.

Water? she thought about offering. Something else? And then sharply: no, no. Nothing. You are not here, in my home, for the first time.

“Tell you what, Rin, I’m going to oil these hinges,” he called, “resin from the wood’s nice—beautiful wood, grain like milk—patient woodcutter, whoever did it—but it’s not enough. You’re gonna need to let it sit, and then give it a try. Do you have wax? For, um, your hair?” 

“Um—yes! Yes, I have it! Can I help?”

“No. Gets in my way when someone does. Spitball me a dollop—"

"Please don't be  _vile_  in my  _dwelling—_ "

"— _hand_ me a dollop, and that’ll do it. I had a friend, used to do this for her with her hairwax all the time when she had a problem with the deadbolt on her proper door, which was all the time because like everyone else I know, she was  _shit_ at taking care of herself. Shoulda done it one last time. Shoulda made sure it would—“ he missed a step, swore, “–lock.” 

Rin blurted, “Do you want some water?”

The sun was angular enough now that she could only see him darkly through the wooden structure, here and there and she thought of the Kaga towns through the trees on that journey. Their intermittence, the fact of their persistence. “Magatsu-san,” she said. “Would you—there’s this story, you know it, about the farmer Togoro, who grew sweet potatoes on the steps of Haku-san, in. In Kaga. And then he found—“ 

“Yeah, I know what he found.”

“Could you tell me the story?”

The movements from the other side stopped. “Rin—“

“Please,” she said. “I've spent a long time thinking about. What I'd say to you, when I met you and Makie-san again, and it's all wrong, I'm angry at _you,_ too, and all I can think of is—we tried. He and I. We looked for the well.”

She could see his resting fingers on the crossbeams, curled as though around the hilt of his sword. They flexed once, twice. She’d slept outdoors for as long as he had, perhaps, could imagine the odd ache in the joints that never quite went away with the cold. Then he began to work on the screen again. She could smell the acrid scent of her hairwax from the other side. She closed her eyes.

“Listen here,” said Magatsu, “there was, there was this sweet potato farmer—“

She stretched down, putting her head between her knees. She wrapped her hands around her ankles. The tension in her back reminded her of bowing but that wasn’t it. The old story unspooled above her and she was there again, in Kaga. She thought Magatsu must have been somewhere of his own, somewhere before her.  She listened hoping for clues but there was nothing, only the steady old tale he’d learned the same way she had, told the same way her parents had, for the first time in years echoing through her old, new house. Nothing had changed, everything had. These were all things that had happened before either of them—any of them—were born, and here they were: still in thrall to them. 

She'd told Anotsu he understood already but it was only partly true; she was understanding too. Why he had asked what would settle her. She was where he'd been now, on the path, and he was dead or not dead but still, as always, ahead of where she was. 

Whenshe tasted the resentment at the back of her teeth it felt so familiar to her, after the nights of unfamiliarity, she might have thought it was longing. 

 _You should have been happy_ , she thought. Her mouth wet with that resentment as though it were a sweetness.  _You should have shown me I would be happy._

“Hey, Rin,” said Magatsu, quietly but she’d been listening. She’d been with him every word of that mountain way. That drawing up of memory, heavy like wellwater, before the discovery. “Yeah. You asked, and—yeah, I’m angry. Makie must be angry. Thing is, it's not the same as what you felt when we did—that to you. We let him do it, and you didn’t. That’s how the dice fell. I know—god help me, I  _know,_ I walked away, I—but he was—that's how I feel, you know?”

“I know.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffed and tangled her fingers in the silver charcoal. “I know.”

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The second ghost came that night, not the one she needed to see to know if someone had visited Doa in the south, and told her the sea in winter was beautiful. This one was another girl with a frieze of hammered-gold hairpins in her hair, some ends inward as though poked in last-minute. Her sleeves trailed on the floor, siphoning up the silver dust. She was hunched over the screen with a makeup tray and a long diagonally-cut brush, squinting at something on the canvas, and when she saw Rin she screamed and told her she’d given her a fright.

“You must be a ghost!” she exclaimed. “You look so pale! Neesan, maybe you died of consumption?!”

Rin glanced at the multiple stab wounds gaping apart in the girl’s three-layer kimono and decided that a guest was a guest and courtesy was a characteristic of a civilized if possibly less than stable mind. “Um, maybe. Is the screen folding, did you check?”

The girl laughed. “Neesan! Why did you ask for it if you wanted it to fold? It’s just like this now. It’ll be like this.”

It had grown longer, spread around the ajar dojo shoji door in the shape of a hook. It was so tall it blotted out any sight of the dojo at all.

“What are  _you_  doing, then?”

She held up her makeup tray. “Painting. See, here—at Yukimachi, I had a pattern like this on my screen. A great cedar tree, even in the winter. I never liked flowering trees. I like the kind that stay the same. Tai-niichan used to oil the hinges for me so it would unfold and there would be, you know, proper  _distance_ between us. Tai-niichan was very stupid…” She sucked on the end of her brush. “Kage-san bought it for me. He was always buying things for us. I think it was because he had nothing to spend his money on. He taught me how to write. Tai-niichan never practiced, but like I said, he was stupid.”

Rin touched one of the crossbeams of the screen pulling the canvas taut. The girl smiled at her and went on with her idle painting. They were long studious strokes like a young girl’s doing her makeup should be and looked nothing like a tree, only a meaningless profusion of lines. Watching the girl it was impossible not to think of her as a child practicing her calligraphy in this same way. If she’d had a childhood, or if any of them had.

Rin stepped back, and then she saw: it was calligraphy, the name Ren over and over again, stroke upon stroke. That hardscrabble girlish handwriting that spoke of careful memorization, intense practice sessions snatched from between periods of whatever else duty demanded.

“He did,” she said, remembering what she’d heard. An Itto-Ryu motto written on an inner castle wall, where she and Doa had set their traps. “Eventually.”

“Did he?” said the girl, and smiled. “I’m pretty tickled to hear that. I thought he could learn to do something different.”

“I wish I could be as...optimistic as you.”

They’d never gone to Yukimachi but she remembered the woman whose leg Shira had amputated and her certainty in her disguise. Now with the clean set of years between those early horrors and herself she could picture it: girls like this one, sitting on the colored mats common to brothels with his brushes in their hands, to whom people like Magatsu hadn't been criminals but only men scrabbling for something different as they scrabbled themselves. They must have known _him_ as well, must have given him tea or soup, learned his small preferences and like she did the habits he’d picked up on some road before they’d met. The way before sleep he tapped his axe on one side and then the other to dislodge the ghost of god knew what sin from the hardened steel he believed he and his blade had become. These women that she shared memories with, who were gone now but like her and like him had also been fossilized within the nautilus of winding years before them, decisions they hadn't made but took responsibility for. People they hadn't known but had taken on the task of loving.

The house bore down on her suddenly as though it had a corporeal weight. She realized at once and with astonishment how little she’d made of it: the fact of someone left alive who shared your memories. 

“Kage-san,” she said. She thought distantly that she might have been close to tears.

“You can meet him,” said the ghost brightly, “I brought him, walking, walking, walking, from the south. Go behind the screen. Don't be afraid. Someone stabbed him, but now he's just asleep.” 

She kissed her fingertips and blew on her calligraphy lightly, solidifying the white slashes on the canvas. Then she braced herself against the screen and pulled. It slid out, a duplicate inside itself. On and on she pulled it until the entire courtyard, and the entire house had been delineated in half. When Rin went to the other side there was nothing there but starlight, and a traveler asleep. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They had come to a place near a shallow lake where someone had moored dozens of charcoal-scuffed skiffs and forgotten them in the fog. They shaded their eyes and called to one another that it would be enough to support their weight from one end to the other if they didn't stay on one at the same time. Rin went first, lighter, easier on her feet. The skiffs clanked and shifted under her feet as though they skated over vast planes of ice. She turned halfway across, and saw him swaying uneasily transferring his weight from one sandal to another.

She doubled back and held out her hand.

"Come on," she said, "take—"

He took a step, and then another, then nearly tipped into the lake. She couldn't help herself: she smiled.

He scowled at her and raked his fingers agitatedly through his hair out where it was damp with the salt and fog. Then to her amazement he smiled back. It was small but had that paradoxical open slyness that children's did, nothing like what she'd filed in her memory. She stopped immediately.

"Well," he said. "An avenger and a dangerous fugitive, drawn up short by a lake of boats. It doesn't reflect well on our Edo."

And indeed here they were travelers in a foreign place; people would see them together, and name them as people with the same home. "We'll think of something. You keep—keep your head about you, just take care of your fever."

"It may be difficult without a tether."

She sat down cross-legged on one of the boats and thumped the wood in front of her until he followed suit. They took their robes out of their satchels, him producing another of the sea-green monstrosities from seemingly nowhere, and she knotted them together while he held one end steady and stared out into the lake, to the far shore clotted with reeds and the horizon that was always white in the shadow of Haku-san. When they stood up she tugged the makeshift rope and felt his answering pressure on the other end. She ducked her head and pressed ahead into the fog.

They crossed the lake like that, the rope steadying him as he held it, her drawing it forward when she felt his presence on the other side steady. She let it out and drew it back. The water's lapping against the sides of the skiffs felt like punctuation. She was ushered forward, she was halted. In the city she often forgot the fact of the wilderness, waiting outside cupping Edo proper like a pearl, but here it seemed appalling that she had ever lived like that, without knowing how much of the world was not the space she inhabited within it. It was hard to tell if he felt the same way but she liked the idea that she had brought him to this place where he too had never been.

He didn't seem anything like a traveler. Only another person pensive, his image clear and then withheld through wreaths of cloud, nothing of him terribly real except the answering pressure at the end of her rope. At one point one of her kimono unfurled, revealing a few daggers she'd forgotten to remove; she saw him look at them for a long time before moving forward again.

On the other side he did take her hand, finally, when he stepped back onto the land. She could feel the fever in his fingers. 

Instead of thanking her, he had said, "How easily you go, when nothing dogs your footsteps."

You draw me forward, she didn't reply. You, who cut my tethers.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

He slept for several days. Someone south had cleanly dressed the wound she'd made; when she placed her hand flat there she felt the heartbeat fingers-widths from where she'd expected it. She supposed Isaku. A blood transfusion from his changed physique likely hadn't hurt matters. She wondered if he had recognized the dagger. She wondered, incidentally, if he was real.

On the third day he woke up briefly to gesture to his belongings in the corner and mutter to her to open the red cloth sack. She found some potatoes of different sizes with oddly involved descriptions in Doa's preposterous calligraphy, and various bizarre drawings of herself and other subjects done in an uneven young woman's long-and-short calligraphy brush. This was probably the sort of stupid gift Anotsu Kagehisa had found appropriate to give Doa.

She set the drawings aside and thought to herself about buying different colored ink sticks and charcoal when she went to see Master Sori. Inexpensive ones, that would grow with Doa's skill. Not too shabby, so she would know Rin took her seriously. Not too much of anything. Just enough for where she was, a girl on her path, keeping a promise. As she thought of this her breathing grew more measured. She stopped scrabbling with her fingernails at her floorboards for purchase. 

Anotsu slept on his back as he had the day she'd met him on the outskirts of Edo, near the drawbridge to the palace. As he had then he turned his head slightly to the side, offering her a vein that made it easy to take his pulse. She did often. There was a flap in the screen that O-Ren had cut and she followed it through and back to check on his presence, only a progression of breaths on the darkened, forgotten side of the house. 

She stayed awake on her side, listening. The screen rising between them silver and honey-colored in its wood and canvas. The building of it slow but now she knew she had been lied to and lying, it was not yet a wall. Not yet a door. Only the delineation she had been making for what felt like her entire life, that their ghosts were still making, those women on the other side of her story: this is what you took from me. This is what I have. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

What would she have done with an unexpected store of gold? Her mother used to use her hands in the telling of the story to illustrate drawing up well-water, a motion neither of them had ever tried themselves. Hand over hand, the invisible bucket came up, full of its gold, cluttered with pieces she'd thought must have looked like ryo in the marketplace. Ready to use. Her mother's fingers on her forehead in her memories of it, peaceful as they both understood the story was coming to its end. The gold was there. From now on the farmer would return home, build it bigger and better, buy cloth for his daughters and his wife, look out at his home scaffolded with that invisible wealth and know it to be the life everyone dreamt of. 

In Magatsu's version of the tale the bucket came up filled with golden dust. The inflection of his voice told Rin starkly that as a child he must have imagined it in greater detail than she ever did, that sort of windfall. Again and again the farmer plunged his hand into it and took it out, the future within his grasp but untenable to his fingers. Through a sieve made for rice finally he strained it and even then so many pieces were lost in the river. He'd stood at the bank, and watched them wash back into the snowmelt of the mountainside. He'd stood at the bank, with more than he'd dreamed of in a lifetime between his fingers, and wondered why still he felt that indescribable absence.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She came back from her work at Master Sori's the next week to find him awake finally, awake and eating from a jar of pickles she'd stored on the other side of the house, where the screen created a coolness. When he saw her he drew a hand across the back of his mouth and indicated the ground in front of him.

She stood there, one hand on the screen. Blood beating in her fingertips.

"Stay there," she said. "Don't. Don't come to this side."

"If I wanted to, I could not. Your house—" he gestured to the screen, "has me here."

"What are you talking about?"

He stood up and walked towards her, to the border of the screen between the shadowed side where he was and where she stood. When he came near he stopped at the edge of the shadow and put his hand out, stopped as though by glass. Something about it did not surprise her.

"And you're well just—staying here."

"I didn't plan to stay anywhere." He'd only eaten with two fingers and now he drew out a handkerchief and cleaned them meticulously. "I didn't plan to be alive."

"Then—then are you?"

He slouched back against the wall, just as Makie had, stretching his throat in the same peculiar way. Perhaps they had learned it from one another. When they were children together.

"You should answer that."

She said, "I have a life now. I'm trying—to build a life. No," she turned it over, tried it again. "I'm trying to take back my life. That you took from me."

"Of course. Do so." He closed his eyes. Before she saw the same thing she had in them on that day in Mito, the blankness she had thought was the snow but now was clear had been something else. 

She took a step towards him, then another. At the second she hadn't known, but by the third it was clear to her what she had been going to do and she slid down next to him, back against the wall. His head dropped down, a sheaf of his hair touching the open collar of her robes. 

They sat there mutely, in the lee of the screen, and looked out into the sun-scored brightness of her house beyond it. She was conscious of her floorboards. The unyielding of them without ceremony. The ground supported you because it resisted you; there was nothing more complicated to its push and push back.

"Your decor is primitive," he mumbled. "I think...the renji...uninspired. Some unimagination I expect...of samurai households."

"Wow, really? Because I'm not from a samurai household or anything." He was seizing in a pincer grip and letting go of the edge of her sleeve, as though it'd never occurred to him what it might be for. "Well, I've thought of having them torn down...widen Doa's window...but maybe I won't...I'll have to see." She pulled the other edge of the sleeve taut, holding it clotheslined between their fingers. 

"Why are you here."

"You—you tell me," he said, too dully to tell if there was a cadence there or not. If they were remembering the same thing. "Once lost. Can it be taken back?"

She shrugged a shoulder to shift him away and got up. When she motioned for the pickle jar and he gave it to her; she shook it and thought it was typically stupid of him, if that was what he'd been eating for the past few days. He must have realized now that someone so bad at managing himself could hardly chart the course of a country, or anything else more fine-grained than that. 

"Makie-san survived," was what she said. "She's alive, and Magatsu-san. What do you want. Should I—"

A terrible, longing light flashed in his eyes before he covered them with his hand.

"Thank god," he muttered, and then with all the accumulated courtesy of years, "as well, thank you."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

She broke awake with her thoughts running to confused, momentous dread somewhere around the fifteenth hour. When she got to the screen room he was still sitting against the wall, blank-eyed. The night wind, sieved through the courtyard, jittered the ropes at his headdress. 

"Doa said the same thing you did," she said. "About the renji." His complete nonreaction could have meant anything. She understood what it was like not to be surprised by someone; it meant you were, had been, thinking of them. That you couldn't lose track of them, on the road or in a darkened house or on the snow-salted, impersonal expanse of the sea. In another fortnight she would have, for a guest, a table to lay, a brazier to light, futons to unroll and weight down and scent with the lavender water and charcoal she'd been allowed to hold vials of, as a child, while her mother laid out her welcomes. Had he arrived then it would be a different story. Not a place where things had happened, a place where things would happen, auxiliary, really, to the difference between a living being and a ghost.

She ran a hand up her shoulder, stippled with goosebumps. She rested her temple against the screen. 

"This is a household now," she said. "If you came on your own, don't you think you don't deserve to demean it? Don't sleep that way."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The house enforced their singular rule: he stayed in the place he'd marked indelibly that night, so many years ago now, and she sat across from him as they had in Kaga and slid his food across to him on a woven mat when he asked for it. Bathwater became a problem but he found a cleared space in the old dojo where the boards had been torn up and there was a woven rain cape laid out on the floor, some student's old hiding place for trysts or letters from home probably, and she would roll an old sake barrel filled with water to his part of the house.

She never stayed. The screen kept its purpose. 

The part of the screen that bisected the courtyard was often drenched with spring rains, and when she went out in the mornings she saw him using his kimono to wipe down the runoff on his side of the divide, disgusting enough that she brought him cloths. They cleaned it every morning on both sides of the divide. It was a bit of housekeeping he could do with his tired body; he mended well, to her surprise, and was careful with canvas like a child who had been told not to touch it. 

These labors were theirs, done together, yet no one could see them. Hyakurin or Tatsu would come by and chide Rin for leaving half the screen uncleaned. They would look past it and there was no Anotsu; he could have been elsewhere in the dojo or he could have vanished. If Doa had seen him—if Doa could see him—she must have been the only person who had. 

The sea had changed him. He didn't talk of the world anymore or the outside, but the narrow way he had in Kaga which was somehow more exotic than his grand proclamations had ever been. The minutiae of food and chores, the small twinges in his missing arm which he couldn't help worrying at childishly, not like someone like Manji at all.

She told him about the same things. Little finds at the marketplace. The difficulty in finding the proper wood for tables, iron wrought properly for braziers. How dry charcoal left her fingers. That was almost like handling a sword but she never said so.

By night they lay on either side of the divide and listened to that same rain undo their progress of the day. Deer-chasers clicking overtime in the garden and the clacker and gush of so many raindrops. There was a watered light held on the screen that when she looked over played submarinean on his face. They woke whenever they wanted, slept whenever they wanted. They were not bound to any responsibilities. The sea had changed them.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"The thing is...what I wanted to _tell_ you—" _  
_

"Look," said Hyakurin in an undertone, "watch, now. Any second. Acts like quite the samurai lady around here, doesn't she, but you look into those big gorgeous eyes and you _know_ she wouldn't know what to do with a mon's worth of patience unless it it was...oh, I don't know, armed and trying to waste her on the Mito way, probably."

"Big gorgeous eyes."

"Figure of speech, little Rin."

There was an edge of delight to her voice. They watched. Presently Makie set her pipe down, pushed the game board away from herself, and smiled. Her eyebrows tented together upward as though holding up her own forehead was simply too taxing and whoever had unjustly asked it of her should now regret the results. "Hyakurin-san..." she said, trailing off meaningfully.

When this failed to yield anything she lowered her eyelashes for added gravitas. Hyakurin smirked at her. Makie indulged in this interaction fondly, as though trading change with a favorite vendor, and said, "Won't you help this convalescent woman? Look, these battered fingers...how they shake..." 

She pinioned her hand demonstratively over the game board in such a manner that two or three of her yarrow stalks conveniently slid back into her zone.

Hyakurin scooted her stool back over and whooped with delight. "You cheating  _snake_! You're playing against _yourself_ and you're still worse than I was! Look at that, look at this stone over here. How could you think that'd be a good move? It's all unguarded, would you just go wading into a melee without any backup?"

"Yes," said Makie.

"Ah, I forgot I was talking to the magical wunderkind here. Even you need a little juice once in a while, honey, which is why you could stand to go to _sleep_ in the night instead of creeping around my house like a wraith—"

"Itto-ryu...whatever works, as they say."

" _You_ aren't itto-ryu—"

Without a change in expression Makie set down the yarrow stalks, swept out her forearm, and knocked the gameboard off the table into her lap. She got up and hobbled away on her crutch. Rin went to her hurriedly but she only pet her cheek and pushed past her, fighting for the perimeter of the house, the pale watered cutouts of twilight on the floor.

When Rin looked over her shoulder Hyakurin was picking up the gamepieces with a closed, coldly patient face. She went to her and knelt, hitching her kimono out of her way, to scoop the little stones out of the floorboards. 

"I'm sorry," she said stupidly. 

"Don't be. I told you, not a whit of patience and I'm glad she doesn't. It was my mistake."

"I don't...I don't see how."

"You wouldn't, little Rin, and I hope you never have to, but there it is," she raked her hair back savagely. Over by the window Makie was hunching over the crutch, dragging her feet on another round about the warehouse. "It was a stupid thing to say. You think I stopped being a mother because my children—"

She cut herself off. Makie had closed her eyes but she wasn't asleep. Only overwhelmed by whatever she was holding in her mind, careful not to spill the idea or memory. The light on her face looked like it did in Rin's house, on Anotsu's face. Like the sea. 

"But she needs to be able to hear it," said Hyakurin. Bell-like, her voice expanded in the space, its high ceilings, its dust. "She needs to listen. Buy clothes for herself. Lose at games...sleep, dreamlessly, the way you do when you find your companions. The way you fell asleep in my arms when you found me in Mito, you precious thing." The game was collected now, she folded the board at its hinges and drew the little silken bag that held the pieces shut. "Because it's true now. You tell yourself something's destroyed, how else are you gonna know it's time to rebuild?"

Rin had chafed instantly when she'd said she couldn't understand, but now she saw the old fatigue in Hyakurin's face, the new iteration that bent Makie's shoulders like a bow and she thought of Doa, so far, talking of boarding a ship. _Come and find me, when we're not young and don't have SO many things to do_ , she'd called from the road, _you get that, right, Rin?_  And Rin had. 

"What was it you wanted to tell me about?" said Hyakurin.

At her house she called out that she was home without thinking about it. When she came to the other side Anotsu was pacing around by the renji in such an echo of Makie's movements that she was startled; stood there without saying anything for a long while. She thought it wasn't restlessness that moved him.

"She's healing," she said. "She can hold a pipe, and play a game." She stopped. "She's so bad at it, though. Did you know that?"

He set his hand on the renji, tender to her house, the timbers of his connection to the outside. Wonderingly, he smiled. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

They were sitting on either side of the room. He was patching holes on his kimono, held between his knees, with a lurid acid-green linen that made the color of the yukata more wretched. She had laid out the brocade cloth she'd bought for the tokonoma altar and was marking it with chalk. Her father's Chinese sword lay on a table between them, her mark of respect not to let it touch the floor but the screen had grown through it and she'd been forced to move it back to her side of the house until the new year's cleansing ceremony, when she could enshrine it in the dojo room.

"No." He smiled. "Do you want it to?" Even then he'd been the same, obtuse as ever in the simplest things but knowing without having to ask what she was talking about. He caught her staring and beckoned. She crossed to his side of the screen and knelt. "It's healed quite well. See."

He held her palm as gently as he ever had, placing her knives back into it. It was not a considerate gentleness but one too attentive as though he was wary of her. He guided her hand over the jut of bone where the arm had been. As he'd said the break was clean, and she could feel skin like old wood behind the thin cloth of his sleeve.

"I wasn't talking about that."

"I supposed as much."

"You did  _not_ suppose, and you don't—look. Were you really going to do all that? Go across the sea and—raise people who would come back to—"

"Finish what I started. No," he looked, for a moment, delighted, but in an awful way, a sneering self-mocking expression she hadn't seen outside of—she hadn't seen outside of this place. "No, finish what I could not even start."

"You didn't want that."

The certainty seemed to catch him off guard. He was silent for a while. When he was thinking hard he regained a little of the old intensity; she liked seeing it here, in her house. Put to a different purpose than it had been all his life.

"I am tired of changing in ways I did not choose," he said eventually. "I keep on becoming different. Not everyone can be like—you."

"Me?" It startled her. "I just wanted to end everything here. But I changed." She thought about it. "I killed you. I don't know if you died, but—I killed you."

"You saved me." 

She looked away. Her fingers had sought something to hold; without thinking she had interlaced them with his, still resting on his shoulder. She thought dimly that she wanted to see the person who had crushed the busu tablet in his fingers without thinking a year ago. That kind of brazen confidence for something impossible, in the face of unimaginable odds. 

 _Choose life_ , Doa had said, quoting him, and now his eyes were dull as the sea, and she had an armful of brocade cloth that wouldn't fit, anymore, the shape of what she thought it was.

"They diverged too sharply, our paths and responsibilities," he said. "It is not the same. Having lost something."

"Hey, don't compare your lousy arm to my  _life_. Even your sword arm, pardon me, axe arm." 

They laughed. The sunlight on her floors was a shade of itself, that old cruelty of spring light without heat. Though his gaze was still distant he kept his fingers laced tightly with hers, staunching the old wound. She didn't take them away.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. silver dusk

 

 

 

 

 

Early dawn, she saw that it was snowing just inside the perimeter of the screen.

She craned her neck at it from where she sat until the steadily thickening drifts past the calligraphy began to look enough like dust that she reasoned a competent housekeeper would get up, indoor weather or not. She snatched up the length of unusable red brocade and went inside.

Cold gummed up her throat and her ears instantly. She threw the brocade around her shoulders—useless, of course Magatsu wouldn’t have picked her something versatile enough to winter in.

"Get up! Get up! It's snowing!"

He was getting to his feet, but it was clear that before she'd entered he'd been sitting against the wall as usual, doing nothing. It upset her enough that she stopped dawdling at the boundary and came in to throw the red brocade at him.

Then she stopped. Behind him, she could see the Chinese sword lofted where he'd stacked seven or eight pickle jars to keep it off the ground. Doa's reunion knife next to it, where she'd displayed it. He was shirtless in only a pair of trousers, shivering in the powdery chill from the snowfall; his yukata was folded under the sword and the quilt she'd left him spread under the jars, a makeshift altar, but it was clean and served its purpose.

She ran back to fetch him a heavily woven shawl from the other side of the screen and waited until he’d wrapped it around himself, sidewise like a bandolier so he could keep his arm free.

"You don't have to keep your axe on the floor," she said, wrong-footed. "You can--you can put it up with my dad's sword too. I think it'd be...appropriate."

"It is difficult for me to lift with my left arm."

There was nothing to say to this. "It's snowing!" she said desperately. "We--have to get it out, or the wood will mildew! Don't you know anything about housekeeping?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't live in a wooden house when you were--exiled?"

The last word knocked the entire sentence askew like a hanging gone off its hook. She winced at how it dangled there but he only scooped up the brocade, gone pale and pearl in the silver light, and unfurled it one-handed.

They went from one end of the divided room to the other, calling out to one another when a new drift picked up speed from the ceiling. The screen was furred with winter light. From just inside it didn’t look like dust but swirled living and purposeful through the air, that muddling of the natural patterning gravity gave it before the room would go completely white and turn unrecognizable.

It was evenly paced snow, with generous cottony flakes. It was somehow devoid of noticeable cold or form and eerie as it had been in Mito, where it had lulled them all with such impersonal softness to sleep. The brocade and the sheets she'd given him to spread on the tatami whipped about with the drifts as they beat the snow from the walls, the floor. The divided room blushed, a warming limb, with their exertions. They skidded like children in the patches of it that lay like banks of dandelion seeds on the floor.  There were snowflakes in their hair, and on their lips. 

They stood panting at the end of it, the cloth limp in their hands.

"It doesn't hurt anymore," he said to her in the bright cold, like a star, that remained behind. "Any of it. I told you."

"You can't lie to me." It sounded different than what she'd meant, which was a statement of fact and not a request. "You can't just--let me say things like that. You should be lecturing me. You're so annoying I don't...it makes me uneasy when you aren't."

"How can it? It's the longest yet you've been in this room."

"I can't." She swallowed. "Those tatami--I can't stay in here. Not even to clean."

"You cannot stay here and I cannot leave, as well it should be. So you may not know. All there is to do is think, and learn the details of this wooden screen and these bloodied mats. I waited for so long to stand here, and now it is only an old house. With its daughter as she should have been. I doubt very much I have anything to say to her that she has not already noted," he spread the brocade wide in his hands, glistening with ice water, "in her plans to return it to glory."

Past the edge of the screen she saw spring birch leaves fluttering in the courtyard’s early sun. She wanted to tell him that they had seen snow like this. They had saved and been saved, in snow like this. No need to fear anything that could happen within this place anymore, if this was all it had for them. None of this extraordinary sentiment seemed to be willing to express itself.

"I think we still have a fair lot left to say to each other," she said.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

They had spent nearly all of their day's budget on a Kaga specialty, tea steeped with dried bodhisattva fruits, and it had helped his lockjaw enough, as she knew it would, that he was complaining about it. She had been listening, mostly because she didn’t know how to prepare bodhisattva fruits for tea and he was being intermittently educational, though with less frequency as the level in their canteens decreased.

“You’d better shut up!” she said darkly as he fished a dried slice from the surface of his, inspected it, and flicked it into hers. “Imagine it gets worse again. Then your last words would be ‘sour and unpalatable,’ which would maybe only have dignity if they were _my_ last words to _you_. Yeah, I’m going to write that down.”

He squinted into his canteen. “Give me back that peel. I did not remove all the fruit. I need the fruit to get better. I need to get better so I—“

“What did you do to that poor lady? Ibane Hisoka?”

There—it had come out. Anotsu glared at her and she wanted to put her hands over her cheeks. Past the hammered tin awning of the old medicine stall where they were resting, sheets of rain came down in a voluptuous monsoon shower. “I mean—I know she was your, um, wife. But—who was she?”

“We were married,” he said maddeningly.

“Excuse me, I said I _know—_ “

“Then what do you need from me? Didn’t your parents tell you how marriages are made?”

“Not _really_ , for obvious reasons! Here, take my _stupid_ tea so you can get _better_ and I can— _ugh!_ ”

She got up and stalked off to the end of the stall. Nobody had used it in seemingly years and the little benches were sheened over with rust and moss, so that the rain, where it blew in, hit nothing that would give it noise. That cushion of silence felt eerie, like you should drop something into it just to disrupt it.

She swiped at a hump of moss with her sleeve pulled over her fist and then snatched it back when she saw the green mark it had left. An slash on the threadbare cotton. She cradled her forearm in her hand and thought with almost clinical despair about how much she was crying these days. Really, it was embarrassing.

Anotsu had come over to peer at her cheeks. “That was a tactless remark,” he continued as though nothing had happened.

“No, I’m not crying over my parents, I’m crying over this laundry…”

“Oh…”

They stared at each other.

“I can clarify some things for your education,” he said quickly. “Marriage…is a social—when a man and a woman—“

“ _No—“_

“—need to expand their sword schools, or perhaps they don’t even have a sword school, or are—vagabonds, or suchlike—“ he waved his hand encompassing them both “—one way to achieve—“

“I wasn’t asking you to explain your views on marriage to me,” she said, aghast. “And for the record, those are _terrible_ views. I just—look, it makes it really weird, um…” Water speckled their faces and he drew back, shuddering in fever. A thin rime of droplets clinging to his hair. She followed their sparkling line across to his earrings, sheened like the axe with a bit of condensation. She’d thought of him and thought of him but could never have accounted for how many details there were about him. The sheer sensory overload of his presence.

"W-widowing someone would have been more improper than, you know...the regular way," she said.

"Yes...I have certainly found it so."

Like that it promptly became a terrible conversation and she wanted to wad it up and kick it somewhere far out of sight, but he had to get in out of the rain. She drew him back into the shadow of the corrugated tin roof. His eyes slanted closed when she sponged the water off his face with the end of the scarf and he muttered a sullen thanks. She could never have that scarf back now, perhaps. It was given to him like this snatch of time and these years of her life. How could he think she didn’t know what the woman’s sacrifice had meant?

“I bet you think you’re so courteous,” she said. “You thank me when I put a scarf on your head, or help you with your tea, but you couldn’t spare as much when—here, tip your head up. You want to be clean, right? What I mean is—if someone meant something to you—it’s. You shouldn’t act like it was nothing. Otherwise it’s like you might as well not have ever been someone’s daughter. Or husband. You know.”

“I made it worse. As it were.” He smiled and it dawned on her suddenly that she had made a grave miscalculation about him. Everything about him. “I have only ever made it worse.”

“You don’t know your own power.”

“Kind words.”

“No. I mean you’re disgusting. You don’t take responsibility. For what you do to people.” She was thinking of the person who had told him the story of the well. Of the woman she and Manji had met, with her hurt, hooded eyes.

She smoothed his hair off his brow. His head tilted up between her palms, the sheened skin, the arch of his cheeks fragile as a jewel-box, or an eggshell. An awful thought came to her that she could sing, or close his eyes with the meat of her palm. It wouldn’t have been strange. “I'm trying hard—to say goodbye too.”

He’d drawn his knees up on the bench and she saw how the wood under his fingers flaked away with his grip. When she left him to go out and check the weather, the rain beyond the roof had dimmed to a periodic shimmer. In the sky, the inky blue mountain night waited, smoldering just above the cloud cover. There were no lanterns or candle-wicks at the old stall, not even a sign that there had been a brazier lit once, it was only a deserted place, now, made alive for the moment by their presence, the peels from their tea, the things they’d talked about.

The land had held them as though they weren’t invaders, but it was strange that their lingering seemed so alien in a place that had been made for people. Perhaps, after all, he had given something to her here as well, and now she wasn’t quite meant for it anymore—medicine stalls, rest, the simple rainy dusk. Perhaps they weren’t meant for it.

“Thank you,” he was saying in a low, delirious voice when she came back. He wasn’t speaking to her. “For setting us free.”

She gathered his arm over her shoulder and helped him get to his feet.

When she looked out she had a sudden moment of panic that she would never see the medicine stall again. She wished foolishly that there had been anything to take, a sliver of wood from one of the tables or an old string from a coin purse. In the dark beyond the roof, past the sound of water, she could hear nothing.

They might have been the last people in the world. There were no ghosts out in the rain. Except, she thought, as they slipped out again, the two of them, pressing on into the anonymous wilderness. No one’s husband. No one’s daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Three fortnights to the new year.

She understood that a questing girl risked the petulance of her house, so the difficulty of the tasks she'd dreamed of on the road made sense to her. Like a child turned away while its parents attended to other matters, left to gambol under kotatsu out of sight and unheard, the house doled out its hoarded reminders to her through the divided room. She thought she could feel them in the snow, the calligraphy, the polished wood of the screen, which was the color and texture of soybean milk, and in moonlight showed a fine grain that corresponded to the whorls of her fingerprints.

Three years of her life she'd given to the road, and in that time there had never been a new year here. There were no pine boughs strung up on the lintels or straw-and-rope shimenawa decorations or doors thrown open to let the sound of temple bells reverberate. There had been no cleaning but only an accumulation of dust as though it were a place she had already given up for lost. The house had rotted here in its old wood and on the road its daughter had missed her coming-of-age ceremony and the date where she should have put her hair up as a woman; she walked in the unadorned rooms now, and she had never felt closer to her home.

She drew a plan for it. The rooms curved around the formerly square courtyard in the shape of a hook. Its right-hand steps, which led to guests’ quarters where students’ families had stayed, had been demolished by the intruders, so she slashed them out with diagonal lines. The left-hand steps led to the kitchen. Her own bedroom and her parents’ constituted the lower left corner, which then opened  into the long dojo room bordering the courtyard until the lower right. She slashed the dojo room in half and then reinforced the slashes all around the divided chamber to delineate the screen. Even with the divided room, it was an enormous house.

The tatami were to be cleaned, decorations strung up and then burnt in the year's end bonfires, and the altar for the tokonoma alcove, where her father would invite their students to display their family crests, finished and installed. She didn't see any way to do it all by the new year unless she had more time.

She went into the divided room to place the plan on the makeshift altar, under the Chinese sword. Anotsu picked it up to read, though he'd disdained her offers of any other reading material, or even, once in a fit of desperation, her own old favorite romance serializations from the kawaraban of five years ago, stored under a floorboard in her room, and preserved, with perverse tidiness, despite all her textbooks lost or stolen.

"The altar for this tokonoma alcove--without students to display anything--is only a decoration for guests," he said. "Suitable for a house, of course, not a dojo."

"Well, it's hardly a dojo right now."

"Then is it a proper restoration?"

She snatched the plan back. "I didn't ask for your opinion on it."

"You said not to lie to you."

"Those aren't the same at all! And why did I have to _say_ that?"

"Well, what should I talk about if not my opinion?" he asked in what he probably thought was a reasonable manner. She stared at him until he grew bad-tempered again and began worrying his fingernails on the tatami in another juvenile protest against civil behavior. "You forget, I knew the Mutenichi-Ryu first as a dojo, you knew it as a house. You likely did not even know that Makie came from one very similar, and what the rules of the house asked of her there."

She'd been so intent on his wanton destruction of property she nearly didn't realize what he'd said, and then it was like being clotheslined. She bent double for a moment, sure she had misheard. 

"Don't you dare use Makie-san like this," she said then, blindly. "I know what _you_ asked of her all her life, you have _no right_ to talk about her that way. She knows what I'm doing. My responsibilities, she knows. And all of those things--" she waved the plan hard enough to dry its ink twice over, hard enough to fan a fire or raise a breeze, if she had wanted for one. "They're my responsibilities for my parents and for my _house_. They have nothing to do with anything that happened. Makie-san's father--my parents would have--"

"Oh, yes." His eyes glittered. "The Asano head family, that allowed another to fall for the use of a foreign sword. _Surely_ they would have welcomed a woman heiress with open arms. Tell me, would they welcome you now?"

"You _didn't do better_!" she cried. "They're _dead_ , they can't defend themselves, I'm the only one left, and I don't know _how_ to but I'm sick of listening to this from you, since the day we met, telling me what I should do when you won't even try to _talk_ to Makie-san, to Magatsu--at least I'm trying to do something for _my_ family!"

There followed a terrible silence. She set a hand to her forehead.

She began to walk to the corner of the room and back, diagonal paths, to still her mind. It dredged up a misery in her, radial lines of a soft ache, answering, a peal of pain for his.

"She _hates_ all of this," she said, "she didn't want any of it. And if you bothered to talk to her--to them--no wonder they left your stupid group every other _week_ we met them, and _they're_ supposed to be hardened criminals used to this pointless...but of course they couldn't be, you don't even care to--"

"Do you think I don't? Why have you complied when I've asked you not to say anything? It is because you know as well as I do that there is nothing to be gained from tethering them to someone they can't see or hear or touch, someone who can give them even less now than he gave them by their side!" No one who believed himself could have spoke with such desperation. "I know that now, I intend to honor the knowledge! It is _well_ that I am on this side of your screen!"

"But at least they'd know you're _well!_ "

She wasn't facing him but the second she understood the mistake she'd made she spun to see his expression, and she caught it. That poisonous sneer sliding back onto his face.

"Am I?" he said, softly. "Am I well?"

She couldn't touch him; she was only aware of the desire to close the distance between them. Billowing up between them like a brazier's private heat. "I told you in Kaga, your dreams--"

He felt it too, the heat. His hand extended towards her, she could see the soft open palm.

"And that is how it is, is it?" he said gently. "You admired some dreams, and the sword schools may die, as long as the last Asano is able to keep _hers_ in the end?"

"Shut up," she said dully. "I remember what happened when the bakufu offered you a place."

He closed his eyes. "It is easy to keep quiet. It is easy to rest here, behind your screen, when it is still only a house."

"That's your trouble," she snapped. Her heart was going and going. "I thought you knew by now there's nothing like _only_ a house. I learned to keep house here, and read and write and cook, and do all the arithmetic and geography I used to survive out there, and use a sword. It was only the school that followed--the rules that reached us--and that's a long way off yet. But as long as this sword--" she flung her arm out, pointing at the Chinese sword on its stack of pickle jars-- "is still displayed like that, in this house, it'll be our school again. Someday. Because that meant something to my parents and to me, and I still live here. And I may have changed, but _I won't forget_. Do you understand that?"

They were the same things she'd said to him so many times before but now they rang wrongly: they'd already conceded one another's point.

There came a slipknot of tension then, one she hadn't seen since the first time he turned away from her, like the condescending slowing of martial movement before a disarm. The heat of the room was gone. She might have imagined it. Behind the lethargy he'd drawn back about himself she could feel the cold, glassed hopelessness of Mito descending on them both. 

"I thought _you_ knew by now," he said. "There is nothing like _only_ a sword school."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Circles and sweeps, her mother had told her. All circles and sweeps, our style. This was how you might pick it out from a lineup of swordsmen. No lines or crosses; they weren't stiff brushes anyone was working with, they were swords. But when a sword drew a circle as opposed to a line, it was still making something, it was drawing a boundary. It wasn't to defeat the other swordsman. It was to keep him away.

And then, to cement the idea, she'd tied a broom to the end of Rin's own practice blade, in lieu of the leaf-cutter drill her father favored for his newest students, and had her draw an even circle on the floor of her bedroom with clean-wash mulberry dye. She remembered her pulling her robes back, one hand on her hair, a little smug at her own teaching method, a little surprising from a woman ordinarily so grave.

It was the clearest memory Rin had of her now. The circles never came out straight and when Rin was done she'd take a fistful of skipping-stones out of her pockets and they'd make a game over the dilapidated ellipses and starbursts. Once in pique Rin had asked her to do it herself and she'd offered quite guilelessly that she probably wouldn't be able to do it either--it was just the logic of the drill. You weren't supposed to look at the other swordsman, even, you just had to draw a circle and the follow-through would be strong enough to turn a rival blade. Then she'd skipped her stone, and said what Anotsu would say again, years later, inflections reversed: this is a style for form over function.

As a very young child, Rin had been under the delusion that it meant the style couldn't hurt anyone. How her house had corroborated that view! Once you started to look for it those elegant circles and sweeps were everywhere, the close warm coil of the house about the courtyard, answering pools of lantern-light widening in its corridors, the ellipse her father's students sat in to encourage her in her forms instead of their customary lines, the medicine rings in her mother's obi for quick treatments and the fine curling nautilus of her hair wound into its knot, in soft shellacked spirals, even undone. Even the courtyard then, circular, and her father had held her back as the students filed in for festival days and she bolted forward to run among them, _now, don't fret. Room enough for everyone._ That was his half of the clearest memory, mirroring her mother's: a man of modest height with a lightness to his step, presenting to her an expanse.

In Kaga, at that lakeside where they'd been found, Anotsu had reacted to the first motion Makie made before they could see her: a single foreboding slash with the rage of a hurricane. She hadn't seen the circle because it was so wide, so spiked with warning, the boundary drawn with so much force it hadn't called to mind those soft shapes of childhood at all.

Looking at Makie's hand on the sansetsukon you thought of ground claimed, not defended. You thought of an explosion that would carve out its blast radius by devastating what was within it. But like her mother, he'd used the language of grace. _Dancing before me_ , he'd said, as though it was some pastime Makie might have enjoyed.

How do you explain it so well, she'd shouted at her mother then, only a child, full of a child's certainty of how abilities should be apportioned, and to whom. How do you know it. You've never been taught.

But I have learnt, came the answer, perhaps that's why.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

"It was a very long time ago," said Makie.

"An old story," said Rin, furious. "So old I never even heard it--right? I _know about that_ , Makie-san, you...you should have said something to me. All the things that happened! You were _disowned_. You had to cut your hair! You lost--"

"I do recall, perhaps even better than you do." Rin cringed and grabbed the lap of her robes. Makie smiled at her and continued her nightly stroll about the warehouse, leaning lightly on the cane she no longer needed. Behind them Hyakurin unwound a fresh roll of bandages with a worried expression.

"Either way, it is hardly your responsibility, although, as I said, it is _a_ responsibility. Is that not so?" This last delivered to Hyakurin, and they exchanged a complicated look. "I have no love for your dojo, child, but I have love for you, for your happiness. My stance has not changed since first we met, and that is where it has to end. There is no redress."

"There _has_ to be! For something like that--" She dropped her hands. "It was--it was a place where terrible things happened to people I loved. And that _did_ terrible things. To people I...care for. If it becomes a place where that happens _again--"_

"Tell me, do you think you are the only one who has ever wished things would be as they should have been?" Makie's voice was as idle and kindly inquisitive as it had been the first time they had met. No hint at all that there could have been anything personal behind what she asked, so it was simple to believe everything had been easy for her.

That was the indulgence she had extended Rin, she realized then in horror. The greatest swordswoman in the world had let her think it easy, the way you hoodwinked children with a magic trick, and she had fallen for it, like Anotsu had. "Do you know what it takes, not only to believe that possible, but believe it your right from the people who should have protected you? From your family? Or from a friend, who despite his--abandonment--is still the only one left, who believed with you in..."

It was the last thing Rin had expected. "You wanted _Magatsu_ to come for you both at Mito?"

A silence fell. Makie was swaying lightly with a swift, tense irritation not yet given attention enough to become anger. In her attempt to keep it diffused she was holding on to Hyakurin's sleeve. "Does it matter?"

"But he's so...does he even do anything? To help? With anything?" She realized she was behaving appallingly and closed her mouth.

"No," said Makie, and scowled. "It is not relevant. As you know, I am a failure of a swordswoman. But if I were otherwise, I would not consider myself an exponent of the Mutenichi-Ryu style."

"Makie-san!"

"I have not done what I wanted for others in my life. But I am well aware of what it has not done for me."

"But--"

"If she said she doesn't, she doesn't." At that moment, Hyakurin looked like she could have bent the cold and the dark away from Makie, heat-waves shimmering in candlelight, with the ferocity of her regard alone. "Don't apologize for what you didn't do. But don't take credit for her accomplishments either, little Rin. She's forfeited enough."

"I didn't--" It was exactly what she'd been doing. How foolish it would have been to act like her intent negated it.

Hyakurin turned from Makie. Her fingers on her elbow made a garrotte, clenching and unclenching. "When you've been hurt," she said, "you know where to lay blame. You should know."

"Is that why you let me say it?" demanded Makie suddenly. "That I am Itto-Ryu. When what happened to you--" Hyakurin set her hand over her mouth.

"Yeah, sweetie. That's why I'll let you say it." She smiled, a little ruefully. "And you'll still say _are_ , isn't that the way it goes. Everybody still wants to belong to something."

"I could never forgive them for what happened to you. If I had been there..."

"You weren't," said Hyakurin. "Leave it."

Makie turned and looked at Rin and fell silent. They stayed frozen, regarding one another.

Then Makie tried to bolt. But Hyakurin had already tightened her hand on her elbow, and she stayed struggling. Her bandages whirled out as she tried to leave but she gave up, eventually, and sank terribly to the floor as though relinquishing her bones to water, one at a time, having no need of them any longer. She was so beautiful it was an indignity and an injustice; you forgot, time and again, that she hurt so, because looking at her inundated you with childhood's own belief in safety that had radiated from Anotsu in Kaga when she'd drawn the sword from his chest. Rin had been thinking of her mother all morning, the sweep and tuck of her hair; it was a shock to recall that she had first seen Makie with her hair grown long. Even then, she hadn't put it up but only worn it divided and loose, like the girl's who had been cast out of her house, with her face so like a woman that it was the last thing you noticed, and on the road Rin's had hung heavy on her own neck through the hot evenings of the lowland road.

They could have divided their burdens, there could have been redress. She wanted to run to her, to take her in her arms or be taken, exchange some kind of reciprocal sense of one another, held, but she could only bow, as low as she could make it while still standing.

"Such fragile bonds," said Makie in a low voice, nearly mocking, ignoring the apology as she did. "What _are_ these schools? What are they? Kagehisa said Itto-Ryu was never one...he didn't mean it well, but indeed, what you managed to bring to it was never questioned as anything other than your own. In my house, my father would have called it stolen--what I do, what Magatsu does. Kagehisa thought differently, but for himself, in the end, I couldn't break him of the habit of seeing any teacher--of discounting any woman," a sudden, furious jerk of her arm away, echo of that Kaga violence, "as your own school would have done."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

On the way home she stopped at Sori's house to return a set of measuring weights she'd borrowed. Lingering by the bookshelves, she found an original vernacular Chinese edition of the Water Margin she had seen in Doa's hands in a pictorial translation. The version Doa had been given was smaller. The scrolls were done on light acid-green crepe paper, so slim their two volumes were half the size their peers on the shelf were, and so sensitive to the spring air she had to promise to carry them under her robes when she asked for them.

Stepping out into the grey twilight she found the sky the color of dirty glass, a vast, cold flat where the horizon meeting it seemed like it should reflect the fieldstone and shale of the roofs, the gable bells, the cold metal of houses that lay like game pieces across the cluttered and intricate palimpsest of the city. People were out and about in the streets as though the new year had come upon them suddenly, had surprised them, although after all it came every year. She saw chapped lips and reddened faces. It must have been a difficult year for so many but still, here they were, as though to eat at that teahouse, or see that play, or snatch a kiss behind that awning, one last time. It wasn't the festivity of midnight yet, only the exhaustion of dusk, an acknowledgment now of the close of the season.

The yearning that came up in her then was different from the familiar grief of the past several years. She thought of her father's enshrining of the sword, her mother's watchfulness, and she felt the absence shore up in her not as a pain but as an ache, the way struck metal keened but a bell thrummed, hummed full with the weight of its striking, new tones striating from that resonance as the initial impact grew farther and farther. This was guidance she wanted, not comfort--one last time, let me see you, let me ask you how to build this, how to fix this. Did you know, when you died for it? Did you know whose grief you died for? This was a new year's yearning, a last reckoning in the darkening of the year. Looking to a history held from the brink by only fingertips, before succumbing to the crushing dark. 

Circles and sweeps, what was begun completed. _There is no redress_. Yet it had snowed in her divided room, and not outside it, still the snow of Mito and the decisive winter she would remember, now, for the rest of her life.

Now she ducked her head into her own scarf, feeling the chilled lacquer of the scrolls click together. The wind that buffeted her, great skeins of invisible silk pulled through the ruts and roadways towards the cloudworn lid of the silver dusk, seemed not to touch anything she held at all. There was nothing she could have kept to remember that first touch of grief as an adult and not a child. She hadn't lost anything she could see. The year was ending, and they were all of them back in their places.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

When she laid them out in front of him there was--finally!--a flicker of his old self in his eyes. She reached out and took his wrist.

"Could you--listen to me," she said. "You were good for them, and you can't make redress for them, and both of those--both of those things are true."

"I do not wish to discuss them with you. I'm aware what you believe."

She took a deep breath. She couldn't let him know what she believed, or what it had occurred to her, with Makie, that she should do. Instead she said, "Maybe it was easy for both of us to think you just ruin everything you touch, but you _know_ we can't do that now," she said. "And you know why." He peered up at her. "You loved each other. I think I know what it means to be children together--that you were too young to know how to think of a life _apart_. And I know you don't understand what I'm doing now, trying to keep all of this alive, but love is--" she shut her eyes; she couldn't look at the screen, couldn't think about how it had snowed here, the snow already closing his eyes at that port, with the fierce tenderness of gratitude the last light she'd seen in them as she recovered her knife. "It's a place where things happened. You can't just _forget_."

He was ignoring the benefit of the doubt being extended in his direction in favor of unraveling the second scroll to a specific point, as though to check if some particular line he cared about was intact and rendered the entire thing worth reading.

"Cherrywood splints bleed and stain scrolls when they are carried about in the rain, under robes," he said, not bothering to elaborate on why anyone would do this. "Look. Some printmaker thought this was appropriate, and now the scroll will be ruined. Aristocratic families are fools."

"Well, _caring_ about that is a pretty so-called aristocratic--" she came back to even keel quickly. "Is it--do you like it?"

"I would never damage books," he said, aggrieved.

Unbelievable. She started to laugh. "Aren't you just a paragon of virtue. Did your _greatest teach--_ did Makie-san give you prizes for that?"

"Now and again." He looked thoughtful. "But she did prefer to read in her bedroll, so I believe...they would have involved damage anyway."

"Must be hard having your beautiful childhood friend, er, appreciate you for not really doing anything that stupid, on...the rare occasions when you're not doing something stupid."

"I try to accept my lot in life."

He was still serious. She laughed harder and finally he began to laugh too, with supreme effort of will or a reasonable facsimile thereof, dabbing at the corner of one eye with the heel of his hand. They kept laughing, and their eyes were wet, and every time he tried to take the scrolls out it set them off again.

"Unthinkable," he said, "unthinkable. Am I never to be done with your mercy." She wanted to take his face in her hands, as she had in Kaga. "I didn't ask for this. Your parents--you think they would tolerate this? Myself, your house--?"

"Luckily your _surly_ and _ungrateful_ opinion is useless to me, so." She sighed. "My parents were the ones who installed _that_. I don't want to hate anyone on their behalf, I want a legacy." She tipped her head at the raised Chinese sword on its altar. "I _did_ save you, you're--that's true. But you couldn't let that lie well enough, so now--you're going to read again, and tell me whatever terrible stories about yourself in the third person, and practice writing with your left hand, until we get you out."

"I have no desire to be outside. This is enough."

"Why? You think it's safe not to do anything if you're sure you can't?"

She hadn't meant to say it but he only studied her gravely, and then scrubbed at the circles under his eyes. He wasn't far away, and he was wan, tired, close enough to blow steam into his eyes if she were cooling tea, she could have taken his hand. "Then just stay alive. Maybe you don't know how to do that. But I do."

He turned the two unfurled scrolls back to front as though they might have yielded a different meaning. She wondered wildly if she had overstepped, and retreated back to her side of the screen. But after a few moments she saw his silhouette poring over both scrolls on his knees, the way a child read, tipped forward to be able to see columns and columns at a time. The small tangerine-shaped lantern she'd been leaving in the divided room for him had never been lit at night, that she could see, but now it was, throwing the little girl-ghost's calligraphy into muted, violet relief. A sweet smell like cloves floated under the screen from the incense threaded into its wick.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The next day, he tapped on the screen and asked brusquely for a Japanese translation.

She went to two booksellers, halfway across town from one another. She blistered a toe in her winter sandals, too new for much walking. The copy she was able to buy was nowhere near as lovely in quality, cheap vellum, with stains where its previous owner had spilled plum juice. When the lantern fluttered to light on the other side of the screen that night, she expected him to toss the scroll away in contempt.

Instead he merely settled back against the wall, his silhouette relaxed as she could see it through the screen. The purpling shadow of him, intimate, contoured by warm lantern-light and a luxury, almost, that she had no more need to supplant with memory. She'd settled with her mending before he finally unfurled it.

He had a fine, sterling, interrogative reading voice. He named the characters with their Chinese pronounciations, twice occasionally so she would remember them. The story was moralistically martial and didn't suit her but she was aware of the fact that he didn't linger, and read smoothly as though something loved by him would come naturally to her. From time to time he would editorialize on a place name, a manuever, a little bit of history, a classical allusion, delivered with clockwork care, as though fitting a nail-sized gear to a mechanism. She pulled thread over and under, watching pieces come together, shapes and colors of covering.

Eventually the reading made him restless. "This is really a misguided translation."

She let him go on like this for a while to rejuvenate himself. "I couldn't tell."

"Your literary education was myopi--" he restrained himself, "sparse...with regards to the text."

"Well, that's true, but right now it's because you're reading _well."_ She was firm with the statement, to hear him shift behind the screen. "Why don't you write your own translation? You'd be good at it. And I've seen you eat with that hand, you can write."

"No one died for me to be _good_ at _this_."

She went on sewing as though she hadn't heard him at all. There was a pain like a gemstone in her chest, heavy, shining, faceted with opaque impenetrabilities, its edges sharp on the softness that spread there, seeming to advance and retreat with the lantern-flame.

Gradually he began to read again, and then only to lie quiet on the other side of the screen, with a stillness that made her realize he must have been listening for her. "It is a place that had room for us," he said eventually, low, "not where things happened."

For moments they listened to the lantern sputtering, the wind's silken hiss in the courtyard. It had begun to rain and they received the sound as a skip in breaths taken, or a handful of stones thrown against their walls. Then he drew his finger down the scroll and began to read again, silent now. She thought about pulling back the part of the screen she'd cut. There might be something else there for a moment, something that could compel her to stay in the room. New words. New voice in a sweet-scented place.

"How could I keep from understanding you," he said, helpless.

 

 

   

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The third ghost to come through the room she knew, and bowed to, and offered a bucket to take off his wet sandals while he covered the large part of his head that was missing with a tea towel, like it was some delightful delicacy.

"It's not _so_ bad," Shinriji offered, hopping on one foot for the sandal, cheery and preoccupied as she'd ever seen him in life. "Not exactly gonna get a date anytime soon, though I'm not sure if that's 'cause of the little, little cranial situation going on up top, or just on account of my general--oh, don't look like that! I like that, bein' straight with you! Nice to have an excuse for that sad state of affairs, not that you'll be needing one, Rin-san, you're looking well, the house is coming along oh-so-nicely, if you don't mind my saying so, and it's awful nice of you to have me."

“Well, keeping a neat house is just the responsible thing to do,” said Rin shrilly. “And I certainly don’t mind guests. It’s not as if I have to arrange for meals for you or anything.” She thought about what she’d just said and wanted to sit down and put her hands over her ears and scream.

Shinriji fluttered his hands rapidly. "That's all fine, you put something in in this state, no telling where it comes out! Ha ha!" He caught sight of her face and backtracked. "But I'd love a little...pig's wax if you've got some. Fruit's beard. Stoat's eye. You know, a little moon juice..."

She twisted the end of her obi cord in her hands and tried to look like whatever this was was temporarily out of stock.

"You don't have any...alcohol...about the place?" He looked contrite.

"No!" She had tried to give Anotsu a bowl of sake one night to finish her cooking stores and he'd glared at her as though she had singlehandedly lured him into degeneracy.

"Aha!" He misaimed a clap at his forearm and it landed with a wet-sounding thwack. "Well, Hyakurin would owe me a couple for that, I was sure you'd never be the kind to have too much around if you were going to be guzzling it up alone, though it'd have made it easier on you, I'm sure of that. Good thing to have on hand in the nasty places we ended up staying."

"Truly, they weren't _so_ bad," she tried. "Other than the..." Everywhere she'd been with the Mugai-Ryu was either dilapidated or unspeakable. "I thought the warehouse had a certain...rustic..." He waited gamely and finally she despaired, and collected her jacket from its stand, and offered him his sandals back. "I'll come and have one with you for the road, then."

It was closer to midnight when they got out, late-shift hours for policemen, artists, metalworkers, and others working overtime for the approach of the new year. There were brightly lettered signs everywhere in carmine and vermillion that in the unfamiliar torchlight loomed up suddenly, and glistened, paint still wet, and then receded. Lights spit blue and red sparks turning the awnings mottled like a cat's coat.

It was different with someone else by her side than the heavy night she'd gone to see Makie. They ordered tofu steamed in kudzu gruel and fish cakes that fell apart in their hands, leaving crescents of oil, the curled prongs of scallions, a sprinkling of sea salt over the shochu that came in small clay bowls shaped like upturned bells.

They talked about her house, about new year's kites, the best way to make them, with the hollowed bamboo, the difficulty of tatami cleaning, and the curious uselessness of various body parts (not relatable; she nodded courteously and came to appreciate the shochu more). Shinriji talked about his love life. Being dead, apparently, wasn't the trouble; he'd crossed paths with this enraged peasant ghost, "sweet thing, looked like a rabbit--big round eyes, I mean," no thumb and no compunctions about it so they were clear-as-day meant to be, but she'd fed him something maybe meant to be a koan about having given her heart to a rooster and shot off elsewhere. "Ain't that a whopping lie of a brushoff!" he marveled, and Rin had to admit that it was. They talked about Hyakurin, but not what had happened after Shinriji "took his leave" as he put it, although Rin took care to mention her short hair, and how it flattered her, to see him raise his cup high enough to bump one of the lanterns and then drain it.

The last time she'd been to a counter like this she'd been with Manji, and she'd swung her legs; she remembered the stools built to the height of taller people. Now she sat with her ankles crossed to the side but she had a better sense of the scale of the place, what her own sandals would look like from the outside in it, and it gave her a sense she fit.

The liquor seemed to have been transmuted in her mouth to a hot, controlled flicker, like the cored tip of candles, or the flat glint you got, only once, turning over a straight pin or an agate in your hand.

"So," Shinriji said. "It's like in Mugai-Ryu, right. How much do you still owe?"

"I beg your pardon?"

He gestured about him with his cup. "Before you're free of all of this. You don't look free, not yet. So, and you can bet any of us down in the shadier parts of town'd see you and ask, with that look on your face--how much do you owe?"

She set down her cup. He covered it with one palm. "Careful, it'll get soot in it. Air's full of soot tonight, Edo Castle direction."

"What? No...that was months ago."

"Begging _your_ pardon." He didn't take his hand off the cup and eventually she picked it up and finished it to let him attend to his own.

At some point the teahouse owner had put another bowl of tofu in front of them and the steam piled thick and fragrant, dewing her skin.

"I don't know," she said. "I--want things back as they should have been. And I still want the place my parents died for to survive. But I want the things that hurt us--all of us--to die. My house knows I can't have both, I know that's why the room's like that, I know I need to choose. But I'm not ready yet. And the new year's coming, and--I need more time." She thought about it. "It snowed there, you know. Is it really stalling the year for me? My screen?"

"Not your job," said Shinriji, ignoring this. "You didn't contract yourself to any of that, did you? Your parents didn't contract you either."

"No," she agreed. "No matter how much I want to ask them what they'd have done instead--no, they didn't."

"Hey, this world we live in, that's not your fault nor your burden to bear. Those of us coming through your room, the Mutenichi-Ryu ghosts--how many of us even heard of the place in our lives? No offense. You hardly see any of us putting our deaths on you--whatever you do, you'll be well within the rules."

Customers were leaving the teahouse. It was late enough that she'd have expected only old, sad people but there were families, children even, girls too young to wear obi and a few young women with their hair put up, younger than her, she realized with a shock, on the arms of brothers or suitors or in one case a governess. Everywhere the thrill of being out that came so readily to people with homes. She wondered if Anotsu had enjoyed evenings like this in the years before he'd come to her, or if it weighed on him this way, how many things he had left to do before he could come to a place where nothing would be asked of him but ease, or regret, and feel he fit. She thought of Makie and Magatsu, their full and brimming memories made in spite of it.

The heat surged in her chest, under her breastbone, and rose up her spine. She recognized, and took, the glow of an idea.

"You'd have been well within the rules to leave Hyaku-san," she said. "You weren't contracted to that. But you were so brave, and she cuts her hair for you because she couldn't stand to forget that--I know you understand. Maybe you'll be the only ones to understand again. I want evenings like this. God _knows_ I--all I want is evenings like this." She looked at her cup. "But while there's even the slightest chance that there might be--some place, anyplace, that has room for all of us...I..." The liquid in the cup tilted, tilted back. "I..."

Shinriji looped his arm around her. "That'll be the soot," he said, "makin' you cry. I told you. Don't look over there, that's where it's coming from. Let's get you home. Your house knows you, that's why it's doin' this. It knows what you want. So if that's what you want--to make your choice--I'm sure that's what you'll get."

At the iron gate to her house, he said, "It was good forgetting though, for an evening, wasn't it?"

Her eyes ached. She'd thought she was done with it. It had to have a limit, this particular pain of knowing you would never see someone again.

She passed a hand over her eyes, clenched her other on the gate, swaying slightly, thinking of Hyakurin, tensing to cut her hair again, unable not to. Forgetting was sweet, it lightened you; this did nothing to disguise its fundamental nature as severance.

"Oh, Shinriji-san!" she said.

When she rinsed her face in her basin she saw that he'd been right. Her face was smeared with soot, the same as it had been after she and Doa had returned from underground.

In the divided room the soot was visible, was still curling in, a blown plume of smoke. The calligraphy slashes gone from their usual nighttime violet to a dark grey and then black, touched here and there with a red deposit of copper-laden embers that did not burn. There was a cordite smell in the air like gunpowder.

The screen, curving all the way around the divided room, had been covered with soot from base to top, black as charcoal with the glossless sheen of makeup. From back on her side of the divided room, it was impossible to see into it at all. The first thing she'd asked the woodcutter ghost to do for her was fulfilled, now: there was no screen anymore, if you hadn't already known that was how it began. Now there was a wall.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Doa had said to her that the shape of a house meant something, and she had been right. The wall changed things. Their reading couldn't continue. When she lay her head against it she wasn't able to hear him or see his lantern-light through the barrier. If she wanted to speak to him she could no longer do it by simply propping the cut-away flap open.

She had to go inside the room and stay there, her two feet on the ground inches from the bloodstains, while discomfort washed closer and closer against her ankles until she felt the tug as though of tides, and had to retreat to the other side again.

Two days after the wall replaced the screen she didn't go into the room at all except to bring him his food and retreat, and on the third, unable to stay for long enough to listen to the book, left brushes, an inkwell, and four or five scrolls of medium length. She had the sense, finely attenuated, that they would need the privacy for the next things they needed to do, his first characters on the page, her next act of housekeeping. A screen gave you privacy; it sheltered you while you changed your clothes or while you slept, it was for a period of transition, always. But a wall was for settled things. A wall was for a life placed into its patterns.

Somehow as they were apart it became more apparent that it wasn't so easy to keep their lives separate. She had made sure of that at Mito. Her house did what it would but the girl, the Mutenichi-Ryu daughter who could have cordoned him off from her life, sequestered him apart in one of the chambers of her quartered heart, was as much a ghost as those spirits who came through the room as it worked its purpose. That girl had known how to divide her place from the world. It was too late for that now. The woman who remained, the heir, the imposter who couldn't understand her own home, had been out into the world, had dreamed it different, had at last looked into the eyes of someone who dreamt the same. Impossible to tell where she lived. Impossible to tell for her, without this, where the boundary was.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

“Does Makie-san always do that—“ she made a series of gestures and flung a braid over her head accidentally.

“You bet,” said Hyakurin, dislodging it for her. “She claims she wears it like that in the bath to keep it out of her way. When I _asked_ why someone needs to wear a scarf in the bath, she said she couldn’t have imagined I’d begrudge a girl a chance to dress up for herself. Can you _believe_.”

Makie was picking her way through a jumble of smallscale jewelry stalls. She had her scarf caught in her teeth again. Rin was dead sure she’d seen her actually take out a pin, consider it, and then put it back into the tambour she’d been carrying in the absence of a shamisen. When she’d asked Makie had gone into the tambour again and woefully offered her a nine-day old pastry wrapped in an erotic newspaper, so Rin had doubled back to Hyakurin for the remainder of the shopping trip and vowed never to inquire about anyone’s personal sartorial decisions again.

Hyakurin was obsessing over the entire display while pretending to ignore it. “Personally, I think she’s touchy about the dark circles. She doesn’t sleep. She’s a malevolent spirit. I get up in the middle of the night and she’s taking baths with that scarf on.”

“It’s not so easy to get to sleep.”

“What?”

“She looks nice today.”

“Oh, well, if you _like_ that sort of—disgusting display of gorgeous—look, did you even need to buy hairpins? You’ve been acting awfully strange.”

Rin gave a braid a yank. “No _._ Yes! I _…_ I _…_ am stressed about the new year—all the cleaning, all the—I want hairpins. I need…a variety of occasion-appropriate kanzashi, as a householder who might be called upon to—Makie-san! Not—the left-hand side has better wares.”

“Will you allow me to buy you a hairpin?” asked Makie courteously. All trace of their earlier solidarity was either gone or subsumed so far underneath Makie's usual languid offensiveness that Rin, for one, could barely see it. But Hyakurin went pink before Makie shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I forgot you also wore your hair clipped. It’s true that hairpins are not compatible with…well, plainness suits us well,”  before patting her arm in a conciliatory fashion and gliding away down the left-hand side of the street. Enraged, Hyakurin plucked at Rin’s scarf and muttered that she intended to give that woman a piece of her mind _and_ get a hairpin out of her, scuttling forward with presumable intent to do both when Makie stopped dead.

Rin swallowed and followed behind them, stomach sinking. Magatsu stood just where she’d asked, holding the requested shamisen slung over one shoulder and gaping at them.

Makie gazed at him with no expression whatsoever. Then she let the tambour down so the drum split open along the hinge, swept up her sansetsukon, turned point-blank and shot off back the way they’d come.

Rin was still staring after her in horror when Magatsu came quickly down the street towards them, rolling his sleeves up as he went.  “I,” she said, hurriedly taking the shamisen from him, “that wasn’t how it was supposed to—“

“Oh, save it. Next time you want to hold a surprise party, is it too much to ask for a heads up?”

“Why, so you could react like _this_?” she cried. “Do you think I have time to do housekeeping for all this stupid—emotionally stunted—“

“I missed the part where this was part of your housekeeping.”

“You're such a fool, Magatsu!” She hadn’t meant to shout like that. “You just—I can’t bear it if I get what I set out for and you two just...you...the both of you, you don’t understand, you think you’re just this beat-up country boy and this failure of a swordswoman, but when I met you two you believed in responsibilities, and doing right by some little—sword school princess—you’d never met, and great things happening to ordinary people who deserved them. You _made_ a place that had room for you and it made him love you, I know it did. And now it’s the new year and you're both still so much of what you've always believed in and—I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it, I’ll never have that again, I’ll never know what it’s like. All I want—“ her head was in her hands—“all I want is one last time to see my family. And if you don't take that for yourself, you're a bigger coward than I thought.”

“Rin,” he said, “if you think this is some shit kind of--payback, we've seriously overestimated you. I wanna...I wanna make sure you get that,” and it was so close to what Makie had said that she flushed and looked at the ground. At the same time she knew, because it had been the same, that she'd been right.

“If you found, um, gold in a well,” she said desperately. “If—if you found anything. Wouldn’t you have bought that shamisen? Without me asking, even?”

He pulled his mask up. Hyakurin had her arm out in front of Rin as though he might actually try something, so he tried to aim a bow at her while drawing his long knife. “Can you catch her?” asked Rin.

“Are you kidding? Nobody can catch her. But she’s been sliced up like tuna, so lucky for you she might let herself get caught.” His stony expression faltered. Then, miserably, he asked, “Why the fuck do you let her wear her bandages trailing like that? And couldn’t you—force her into warmer clothes instead of that stupid wrap thing?” 

“She hasn’t been sleeping either,” Hyakurin blurted unexpectedly.

They both looked at her and she crossed her arms. Magatsu drew the smaller knife from his blade grip and tore off.

Makie had taken the street at a dead run so fluidly nothing had been overturned, but the three of them in pursuit made a terrible clamor. Vendors swore after them as they went and Rin shrieked apologies in every direction. The hanging beams of signs swung at them out of nowhere and Magatsu turned them aside with the flats of his blades, ducking under some to pull ahead of them until suddenly, a handful of beads skittered out into the street and Rin went flat on her back with the wind knocked out of her. Hyakurin had dropped to a crouch to crawl, wincing slightly with on her stomach, and Magatsu swept the ground in front of him clean with the cutting edge of his larger knife, overturning a bunch of pails.

“Don’t jostle that woman, citizens! She is with child and doesn’t heed good advice!”

Amid the shouts they looked up to see Makie swaying slightly with her feet stabilized on either side of an awning, holding a bunch of unraveling bandages to her side. She was still expressionless.

Magatsu shaded his eyes and looked up at her. It was obvious he was trying to make some kindof witticism but under the searchlight of that stare his shoulders drew together, his eyes suddenly looking very tired over the mask.

“Just me, woman,” he called. “You know I can’t do anything to you.”

“I’m afraid you already have.” Still, they stared at one another.

Then Makie demi-volted fluidly to the side, hacked one side of the awning loose, and leaned hard on her blade as the cut cleared to propel herself away from it. The cloth-covered beam it hung from swung towards Magatsu with alarming speed. Rin screamed; he reached behind him, stabbed a side of the empty rack the pails had fallen from, and heaved it bodily into the path of the beam.

The momentum broke and the rack shattered on the spot. Magatsu clambered over the wreckage and went off after Makie, who was taking the awnings two at a time, holding the middle pike of the sansetsukon horizontal as a balance aid.

She was coming to an intersection and Rin saw a flash of irritation in her eyes as she looked down at the shopkeepers, who had rallied below her in rage when she’d shouted down. Too many people to swing her pike fully, keeping Magatsu away, only enough space to stab. She assessed the situation and in that time Magatsu grabbed Rin’s arm and pulled her close. “Listen, take the little Turk. Get to that stall right below where she’s standing, you see the bronze brazier they’ve got up? Hanging off their awning?”

“Y-yes…”

“When I tell you, you’ve got to cut its restraints. Okay?” He pressed a few ryo into her other hand.

“What’s this for?”

He looked scandalized. “Well—you have to _apologize_ to the _dude!_ ”

When she looked back Makie had made up her mind, preparing to make the jump across the street to the other side of the intersection. As she did, however, an arrow whistled in a sharp transverse path through the awnings and pinned one of the unraveling bandages to the crossbeam behind her.

Hyakurin had caught up, breathing hard with the crossbow unfolded and pointed straight at her. The bandage spun out like a spool and Makie clapped a hand to her side and spun counterclockwise to disengage it entirely. As she did, Magatsu made it to the stall beneath her awning and slashed the cloth beneath her away in one long sweep so she dropped down through it, now missing the leverage she would need to jump across the street. Undaunted, she whirled about and raised one end of the sansetsukon into the air, clearly intending to bring the rest of the stall down and trap Magatsu there.

“Rin, come on,” shouted Magatsu, and Rin swung with all her might at the jute cord tying the heavy brazier to the awning. It fell straight towards the sansetsukon. Diving in, Magatsu drove his knife into the stall counter parallel to the ground, making it the fulcrum for the sansetsukon’s downward swing. Under the makeshift lever his blade warped, shuddered, and suddenly broke with a snap like glass. It held long enough for the brazier’s force to slam the sansetsukon lever into the ground so hard that Makie was flipped into the air, the rest of the sansetsukon pinwheeling crazily after her.

If she’d stuck her landing she wouldn’t have needed the moment to get to her feet, but with her wounds she chose to telescope and roll for safety instead. It took her less than a second to unfold from her kneeling position on the other side of the street. She clutched at her side, the bandages wilting about her hips. In the single moment that reorientation took, Magatsu snatched the shamisen from Rin, hefted it, and threw it straight at her.

She dropped the sansetsukon immediately to catch it one-handed. Rin let out a squeak, dashed to the other side of the street and scooped the weapon up. It wasn’t necessary. For whatever reason Makie had stopped trying to flee and was examining the shamisen with a chill, private focus.

There was an odd detente then, the shopkeepers shouting, Hyakurin’s cajoling in the background, Magatsu’s stricken face.

“Feels weird without him to get you up in the air, right,” he said. “Not enough warning?”

“Indeed. Force of habit, although we haven’t done that in….five years?”

“Gotta be six. That one time—in that stepped castle—“

“Ah. Yes, I recall now. How many Turks did you break?”

“Maybe like, three. We had to get you over a lot of gates.” He made an affected, farcical face. “’Magatsu, you shouldn’t be so stingy with our method. If you don’t find the requisite point properly, the sansetsukon will break—‘”

“’—and that would be unacceptable...my dear, please do not encourage his parsimonious nature…’”

They smiled, completely mirthless. She flicked two fingers in the direction of his shattered knife. “So breakable.”

He indicated the bandages around her waist. “All or nothing.”

The look that passed between them had compulsion. It spooled out like a lifeline and then caught on them both; there was nothing it could do but reel them in across the distance. Makie folded up mothlike and dropped neatly to her knees in the dirt. Magatsu crossed the street and helped her with the shamisen, fitting one hand carefully under the neck. Doubling back to pay the shopkeeper for the brazier, Rin snuck fretful glances over her shoulder.

“—the both of you, wounded,” he was saying when she returned. “There’s something I never thought I’d see, to be sure.”

“And indeed. You didn’t see it.”

“…Kashin got to you in time? How many bullet wounds?”

“Eighteen, I am told.” Makie had taken up rest position expertly on the neck of the shamisen but her right hand’s fingers were shaking so badly she’d dropped the plectrum. “Why didn’t you reach us. Were you hurt? Waylaid?”

Magatsu unslung his mask, tore off a strip, and took her hand. Carefully he wrapped the plectrum into her fingers, binding it loosely.

“Not hurt. Not waylaid. There, you’re fine.” He tucked in one end of the binding and helped her situate her hand over the strings. “You’re fine,” he repeated, when she continued to stare at him. It wasn’t until she was a few chords into her ballad that Rin realized their eyes were full of tears. She got up and stepped back. Hyakurin took the sansetsukon from her wordlessly. 

“I don’t like shamisen that can make noises properly,” Makie was saying in a dull voice over the arpeggios. “I told him and I have told you since we were ten. I want _my_ shamisen. From the port. It must have been a matter of hours, and _everything_ slipped out—“ she lifted her hand, the plectrum bound to it, her shaken and battered hand that hadn’t faltered on the handle of the pike, “out from these fingers. You knew, didn’t you. That’s why you weren’t there.”

He waited until she finished the phrase. It was a difficult one with a scattershot fingerpicking pattern and she wasn’t ready for it yet, but they all stood, and listened to her attempt it, and attempt it, and attempt it again until she arrived at a place where she wanted to stop herself and shut her eyes in distress.  “I buried—someone.” Magatsu moved as though to take the shamisen from her but his hand stayed covering hers. “Eighteen bullets in her, too. Clothes shredded. Couldn’t even keep her insignia.” His mouth thinned. “I guess I had to see it one way or another.”

 “You loved him, and you didn’t spare him a look _._ It shows your character, I have no need to hear what you did instead.”

“Now _that_ sounds familiar. She died because I tried to tell her otherwise, but our _character's_ not worth shit until we die usefully, is it?”

“Magatsu,” said Makie, “I am not doing this. I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to listen to you. I wish you were dead. I wish we had all died together.”

“Uh—“ he cast an irritable glance at Rin and Hyakurin, who quickly pretended to be engrossed in a vendor’s cart. “Well, maybe next time heads up on the wish list before I’ve already gotten you a present, I guess?”

“I never ask you for anything.”

“Oh, yeah, and when you do, it’s so minor.”

She almost smiled. Then she made an odd convulsive movement, gagging, and suddenly her cheeks were wet. All the long days of traveling, her red-lined mouth and the precise shape of misery, but it occurred to Rin then that she had not seen her cry once. You could cry when you felt surprised at your sadness and that, Hyakurin must have already known, was something else Otono-Tachibana Makie had already forfeited.

The shamisen clattered. Magatsu looked like he was struggling bodily on the edge of something and then went over it, all in a rush. “Look here, woman. Look at me. Don’t forgive me, okay? I don’t want it. Not from you.” His hand moved down the shamisen’s neck, pulling it from her until she slumped forward and put her forehead on his shoulder, still dry-heaving up those sobs. His own tears fell into her hair. “I mean it, what are we going to do with each other if we start measuring out all our grains of rice?” Rin turned away. Magatsu ducked his head miserably into the lee of Makie’s neck like someone being lifted by a parent and Rin glanced back at them, thought: _we were all children together._

“I’m already here now, though,” he said, without looking up. “Should—should I leave again?”

She didn’t answer. When they went to her, pulled her away, they saw that she was fast asleep.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m home!”

“Is it you?”

“For your information! That is a stupid question to ask as a _spirit,_ or something, that only I can even _see_ —”

“I thought it would feel nostalgic for you,” he called in his dreamiest voice, “maybe from when more people lived here.”

She stopped dead in the middle of unwinding her scarf, stared at the screen's blackened wall where it hid him from view, then took her cloak off and dropped it on the floor to go into the room. Maybe that was familial, not hanging it up neatly. She could see herself letting it pool on the floor if there were someone she couldn’t wait to go to, to unspool all the events of the day for. To prolong it she went and stood against the edge of the gateway, and then she gasped.

He'd dug all the tatami out of the floor to one side of the divided room and begun stripping their borders one by one for cleaning, winding all the detached strips of silk around individual pieces from a set of golden wasps she’d left under one of his growing stacks of books. She had no idea how he'd managed to do it with his single arm but she suspected the feat was responsible for the fierce, proud skew of his shoulders as he turned back to her. Something she hadn't realized was missing until she saw it now.

"You are never going to come here long enough to be able to do this, let alone in time for the new year, so I began without you. It is hardly pleasant to sleep in such squalor.”

With what was surely a sign of maturity she refrained from pointing out that he'd been doing so for the last dozen days, as well as where the squalor had come from in the first place. “Right.“ It couldn't dent the crazed, buoyant glee that had inflated and glowed steadily inside her since bidding Magatsu goodbye at Hyakurin's, trying not to say anything about tear-trails soaking through masks and the indignity thereof.

"Are they speaking to one another again?" This said without looking at her; she supposed the rescinding of the no-discussion policy was something she shouldn't note either.

"Kind of," she ventured, and then, "wait, how did--what?"

"I am still very well acquainted with the proclivities of my so-called friends," he said, the most astonishing lie she had heard in weeks that had featured listening to Makie talk over breakfast. "And of...of you. With a greater margin of error."

On impulse she stomped to the center of the room, and forced her arm awkwardly into the crook of his elbow. He made a sort of non-homicidal rictus with his mouth. It felt like they hadn't seen one another since the wall went up.

They swayed in place, mildly alarmed by their enthusiasm.

"I won't ask you to try to come out, or to talk to them again...but haven't you ever been terrified of being _happy_ like they are? Like it's forgetting how important it was that you _weren't_? Don't even answer, I know you." This statement was so true it embarrassed them both; she nearly removed her arm and gave up on the entire enterprise. "I mean I--at the port. You felt that way, I know."

"You must have been an inkeeper in another life, meddling in disputes for your guests. Offering all types of unasked-for counsel, and going on about the rules of the house."

"Oh, pot, kettle. And they don't do anything right, those awful litigation inns. Before I found you again, I stayed at one while--when I wasn't staying here. All they said to me was to wait my turn."

"Typical bureaucracy."

"Are you _complaining_ about that?"

"Neither of us would have had to do anything had it gone the way it should have, is it not so?" She wanted to put her finger on his forehead, where his eyebrows drew angrily together, and push until the groove either smoothed out or became permanent. "We never set foot in such an inn, the three of us. What could they have done for our grievances?"

"Well, I think they'll get there on their own now, Makie-san and Magatsu. They both have, sort of a bad...sense of humor. Bad taste."

“Well, that is interestingly observed,” he said.

She laughed and he looked thunderstruck. What little capacity he had to be sardonic; it was too sour a sentiment for a soul with such uncurdled longings, untempered agonies and regrets that lay heavy along him as lashes, stinging only in their absence. He couldn't joke about what was wrong with the world without making himself angry. At the thought she became conscious again of the softness in her chest, acutely responsive to that anger. Tender and aching, camphor taking to flame.

“I have separated the mats that still have bl—that are unclean, and we can burn them at your leisure," he was saying.

She looked at the mats; she looked at the deepening crease between his eyebrows. “That sounds—fine. Then we can move on to the decorations.” Her toes curling and uncurling on the line of shadow the wall cast, her lungs still full of stupid joy that now hung there, unwilling to deflate. He had slipped into that awful _we_ so easily.

"Have you been translating?" she said, to discomfit him, successfully. He frowned and waved a hand aimlessly at the scrolls and brushes laid out next to his sleeping mat. She detached herself from him, reassured herself that at least two seemed filled with something, and retreated back to her side of the wall.

After a few moments he stopped glowering and passed the stripped tatami to her to roll and fold as she sat on the other side of the cut gateway. She drew a little closer to tell him the whole tale. He stopped stripping the mats to listen, and gouged her floorboards with his fingernail until she reached across and picked his hand off the ground as though it were a lizard. Then he looked at her from under his eyelashes while she went into a circuitous recount of  Magatsu’s experiences purchasing a shamisen, throughout the duration of which he'd been so sulky and annoying she'd expected him to pull her braids and call her a schoolyard name. She had the nonsensical impression of explaining to a younger sibling that its parents had gone out for the night.

Eventually she said, “The thing is. Makie-san said, uh, she wished they both were…dead?”

She was having trouble with a splintered weave in one of the mats. He tossed one of the fabric-wrapped daggers to her; she unsheathed it and went to work. They both murmured in satisfaction at the same time when it came clean.

“Well, she is sometimes imprecise. A ‘human flaw’ of hers.” Disdain for the phrase was evident in his voice. “She must have said she wished we could have died together. That was what she said when we stayed with her in her quarantine house.” This offered fondly as though such a thing constituted an even remotely positive memory. “She said the same thing when we were nine, and we all took the cough. My grandfather made us all sleep in a tent so the sickness would work through us at the same time, and we wouldn’t take ill later. Children are rather disgusting. I don’t know if you have ever met a child.” Rin rolled her eyes. “I am sure it would have been all right if we had kept away from each other when one of us was sick, but—”

“But you couldn’t stay away.”

“No.” He stopped talking for about two minutes and there was only the long tearing sound of the borders coming off, her mother’s stitches, undone for the last time. He listened fully to every shred of the sound with the same cold concentration he’d leveled at Habaki, waiting to die.

Then he said, “They would fall asleep, and their hair would…go into their eyes. It would stick to their faces.” The sound of his nails scratching at the floorboard again. “They were quite small. I was as well, of course, but—when that happened, they felt smaller than me.”

“That’s ridiculous. Your hair probably got in your eyes too.”

“You can’t prove that. You weren’t there.”

They contemplated this. Then she said, “I don’t know why I did it.” Now that the giddiness had abated it was mostly true. “Neither of them wanted me to. Magatsu said he’s not exactly going to be sending me flowers.”

“I do.” He wrapped the silk around the meat of his palm and turned it back to front. “If someone meant something to you...you shouldn’t act like it was nothing. Yes?"

They could have been children, doing their chores in the great divided room. Generations ago it might have been real. She reminded herself that there should never have been a catalogue of things they had seen, together.

"Never forget," he said. "You told me."

“You know what I missed, that I remembered when I saw Makie-san fall asleep, like that,” she said, slowly. “My father used to come home and put his hand on my head, right on the part where I parted my braids. All tender, really. And it used to drive me crazy, but if he didn’t, I’d shove my head under his hand until he paid attention to me. And I’d grab my mother, all the time, even if I was just lying on her lap—I couldn’t stop grabbing her hand, or her waist, I thought she’d go somewhere. And she did, so.” He was still staring at the piece of silk. “After you killed them,  I didn’t touch anyone. And no one touched me. I thought I could sit down in the middle of the street and take ill. I thought I could just lay down there in the cobblestones and die. And no one would touch me, ever again.  I felt worse than human. I felt like a ghost.”

He’d turned his head so he could look at her full on, still steady. He lifted his hand and she tensed, anticipating what he was going to do, but instead he only extended it between them, palm exposed. She'd reached for him without thinking the first time, but now it was deliberate.

Once it was all she had wanted from him: that deliberation, all that bright attention fixed on her and what he had done to her. _If someone meant something to you—_

She had to close her eyes, then. So she couldn’t see it but only feel herself leaning forward, sleeves whispering along the floorboards, over the crenellated shadow of the boundary. He cupped her jaw and moved his hand back, smoothing the shock of hair that had fallen over her eyes. She felt as though the house itself witnessed her as he touched her, that sick, instant feeling of familiarity. His thumb lingered over her closed eyelids, soft there and then firm on her temples. Not here, said the light pressure. We haven’t yet been here.

“I was all wrong,” she said. “There’s not always tenderness in it, loving someone. Is there?” Makie’s rueful anger, Magatsu’s shame, their helpless heads on one another’s shoulders in the absence of what they were missing. Her own blow, she thought idly as if from very far away. Striking true. After Mito she had wrung the snowmelt from her robes and thought halfway through, numb, that she was washing away the last sign that he had been together with her in this world.

“In Kaga, you…“ he went silent on the end of his thought. Then, cautiously, “Certainly there is not always love in tenderness either.”

“So I don’t have to feel bad about wanting—“ She stopped. “About wanting—“

He frowned as though it had been a real question. “I don’t think so. What else is there for us to do now?”

When she went to set the tatami outside she nearly collapsed against the doorjamb, dizzy to her very bones. She dipped herself water from the ceramic urn at the front of the house. The light on the black walls of the divided room made it too difficult to tell what time of day it was; it was as though no time passed there. Massaging her temple she thought she had better reorient, see where the sun was. When she opened the gate to her doorstep she caught her breath. Spread across the evening, punchily aglow, were eight sheafs of parchment full to the brim with flowers.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually she placed the flowers in a tureen of water and brought them into the divided room, where Anotsu displayed maladjusted unawareness of what they were and ruined most of them by trailing his hand in the water, worrying at the petals while reading until they fell apart leaving a yellow fur on in his fingers. Frivolous to press, impossible to plant. The entire gesture was an allusion to another life in which she might have known what to do and this made it painfully sweet. And the next morning she heard “Hey, Rin!” and came outside to find all three of them there, silhouetted by early morning radiance.

“We were malingering about...” said Makie.

“Thought we'd knock on your door,” muttered Magatsu.

In their hands they had things she hadn't seen in years: lumpy balls of bright, younger-smelling incense, tins of oil and wax for old wooden floors, new brooms, carpentry staves, fresh-cut pine boughs, looped lengths of green springtime brocade that trailed out of their arms as though they weren’t quite sure what to do with it, and indeed must not have been, on the road as they had been since before she’d left. But here they were now, coltish and uncertain but taller than her, long reaches enough to be mindful that the cloth they’d brought for her new year's decorations didn’t touch the ground once.

She ducked her head, eyes suddenly stinging.

“Come in,” she said, then, “please!”

“For god’s sake,” said Hyakurin, “it takes you so long to ask.”

She laughed so she wouldn’t do anything else. When she shaded her eyes with her hand colored dots swam across her vision haloing them all, and then she saw it again: her forgotten doorstep, covered with flowers.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

How the geography of a house could split and split again, with people in it! It had all been hers before, easy to wander and easy to sleep with one hand trailing down into the courtyard; now the new Mutenichi-Ryu was a place where she-- _she!_ daughter of the house!--bore the astonishing imposition of having to knock. They laid their mats in the old Asano parents' bedroom adjacent to Rin's own at night, citing Makie's need for constant care despite her blank-faced, ecstatic mumbling about impropriety. But come daylight they spread all over the house, quick and aimless as fragrance but directed by reinventory of the defunct kitchen, the garden no one allowed Magatsu near, all the sliding doors that were thrown open to let the scent of pine fill the house and the uprooting and beating of every tatami mat in the place. The house became a place characterized by its long hallways and the things that echoed in them as people passed one another, shouting excuses, jostling for space. At any given point in the day there were bangs and crashes, Magatsu swearing at nothing as he installed the fashionable wall-mounted lantern braziers that were all Makie had found at the market this late in the winter season (“Well, they were not _all_ that I found,” she explained, after Magatsu had singed his hand on one and spent the rest of the afternoon bad-temperedly sewing artwork backings out of brocade with astonishing skill and not speaking to anyone, “I just went to two shops and then I felt overwhelmed by the futility of existence when one’s own friends abandon one to—“). After a few hours of this Hyakurin grew alarmed enough that she went out to buy sandbags and made Magatsu wear these under his clothing like a child, ostensibly as a fire retardant, which sight Makie found so agreeable she could be persuaded to do the floor-sanding she insisted on in the same room, pushing a blade rubbed with rock crystal along the floor inch by inch while leveling everyone pained, melodramatic glances they ignored.

When she lit the braziers for the first time and the lanterns bordered in pitch blazed to life, the towers of light lent the place an air of surprising sophistication, like a palace, and they were all so surprised that everyone shrieked, from different points in the house, and took to running up and down the hallways like idiots, coming upon the lights from different angles. Hyakurin whistled with two fingers, Magatsu blushed, put his hand on the back of his neck and winced at the burn, and Rin, unable to speak, worked up the courage to put one arm gingerly around Makie, who kissed the top of her head condescendingly and extricated herself to make a great show of pushing the makeshift sander another arduous foot across the floor.

They dodged icicles. They complained together about a shuddering rafter that sounded like a bird. They met as if by chance in the hushed silver dusk to drink water out of the ceramic urn whose level decreased three, five, ten times faster than it had when it was only Rin and Anotsu, and made braying awkward conversation about lemon polish. They wasted materials on attempts at fashionable updates instead of cleaning, connived for extra funds and listened to Magatsu's aghast lectures. They forgot things at the market; they sent one or the other of them out to get them again. They cut great strips of parchment to tack to the wall brocades for decorations. No one could draw but Makie demanded absolute silence to write the wishes for happiness, peace, joy in the most beautiful calligraphy any of them had ever seen, ruined when she inevitably fell asleep over her work, drawing dream-circles leisurely in a warm well of ink (Rin took one of the botched attempts into the divided room, where Anotsu looked at it, smiled tenderly, and then criticized the weight of the brushwork so harshly she rolled it up and threw it at his head).

Left in the middle of tasks, spaces in the house took on the look of them, like a sheet of glass fogged up with the scent of the steam behind it. With her heart in her mouth Rin made room for Makie’s bandages, the blue-dyed linens Magatsu wore in his life as a laborer, the dishes Hyakurin bought that filled up with nails, thread, hairpins, needles, straight pins, flower petals, brocade scraps, incense pieces, wax, lemon juice, all the little content exhalations of a house with people in it, that had never remembered it had been anything else.

It came to her now and again, with an edged clarity, that she could knock all their possessions down, or refuse them all space. She put the thought out of her mind. She walked back out to the ceramic urn to find them dipping her water. Drinking of it deeply, leveling uncertain gazes at her over the dishes or dippers, the sheer civilized propriety of a house that needed separate utensils for the mouths it fed. Not enemies. Not friends. Only householders, keeping house.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

Once--only once--Magatsu opened the cutaway to the divided room and peered into it, on his sweep of the place for extra nails and screws. She held her breath but he only went into the room, looked around and shifted the sod in the corners with the flat of his knife the way the woodcutter ghost had done. Anotsu wasn't there, his books and his mat lay on the floor, next to the pickle-jar altar with the sword and Doa's knife. She could see Magatsu mulling over the details of the torn-up mats. For a fierce moment she wished they had still been there awash with their old bloodstains for his feet to touch. When he turned back his mouth was pinched together tightly, crows'-feet at the edges of his eyes and it was guttingly easy to understand how he might look at forty, at fifty, none the happier, his own cowardice aging and curdling under his skin with all the empty years for him to tend it unfurled ahead of him.

It hit her suddenly that he might have never come back to this house. Might have done something pleasant, something simple, for his entire life, and still one day looked like that.

When he saw her staring his mouth spasmed at her abortively and he moved past her, half his shoulder in shadow. The silver winter sun made a harsh crescent on his blue clothes.

"'S good," he mumbled. He didn't touch her and she didn't think she could have borne it if he had. "Good job boarding it up. Hoped there wouldn't be anything in there anyway. Some books...?"

"I sleep there, that's all. Now and again."

He gave her an odd look. "Right."

When she went back through the gateway Anotsu looked up at her, that old imperious attention he got back a little more of, every day. She drew her fingers along the sooty wall. She went in to meet him.

"Magatsu tried to come in to you," she said. "He just did."

"Late of him," he said, so immediate he could only have been thinking of it. "Had he succeeded."

The little flutter of guilt she'd been nursing opened up, like a wound, seamed over again immediately with a vengeance.

"You're right," she said coldly. "They _are_ better without you."

"They have a chance to forget me," he said. "You do not. Perhaps some part of you wishes you had what they had."

There was silence. He smiled at her then, icy and determined as though he'd been waiting for her, went to his axe lying by the wall as ever, picked it gingerly up, the new muscle showing on his left arm, and hefted it onto the altar next to Doa's knife. She thought of how, given the chance, she should have asked him to lay it down entirely. She thought that he would not have smiled like that now, choosing to lay it there himself, if he had. But when he tried to pick it up again it dragged him down and a flash of pain spasmed across his face; he dropped it immediately and knelt, hissing.

She went to him, holding his shoulder. Pressing her cheek into his hair, trying not to look at him, hearing his winded breathing nonetheless. His rage. She wondered how anyone could consider such contact affectionate. "If you're a swordsman, know your weaknesses," she mumbled into the crown of his head. "You told me. Nothing's changed. You've got--backup." He shook as though with fever again, so familiar to her. He gripped her hand and the grip was strong. She wanted to turn her fingers back to him when he let go, and show him. This is who you are. You touch things; you change them. You couldn't help but leave a mark.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The big covered bowl of noodles and turnips and scallions they’d been picking at ran out in five days. Hyakurin was not a particularly good cook and Magatsu would scrimp by serving things like plain rice with water that had been used to rinse spinach. When they leveled tentative inquiries at Makie, she said, “my darling child” six or seven times while shaking her head sagely, and then sat Rin down and forced her to listen to a very long and convoluted ballad about a slug that crawled into people’s ears and read their memories, upon which nobody felt much like eating and went to bed hungry. They got up in the middle of the night, ravenous and ready to waste ryo on teahouse alcohol in hopes of getting anything to eat. Rin shouted them out with a shopping list and a litany of serves-you-rights.

When she heard them come back in around two in the morning, she tucked the end of her robes into her obi and went quietly into their room. Magatsu had doubled over the brocades they’d been using as two pillows into one long one and he and Makie had gone to sleep frowning, back to back, shoulders touching. Makie had extended her arm to her other side, her long fingers resting gently on Hyakurin’s hip, just where her stomach began to jut out.

Rin knelt down at their heads before returning to her own room. The moonlight came to drape over them in long pale blue stripes that looked soaked. She put her hands in her lap, looking at them, these people, all their clamor and their aliveness. She hadn’t thought of it in a long time—how a dead place blossomed under that aliveness. It was like being full after hungering. The body forgot what that emptiness had been like.

It took her a moment to identify her own fear. She put her hand over her mouth.

In two steps she was on her feet and out of the bedroom. She was at the screen, still dark with its soot. She found the covered gateway and snatched it aside.

He was there, sleeping against the wall. To protect the Chinese sword from gathering soot at night he’d bundled it up into the yukata  he’d put back on, and had wrapped his shawl around the sword and himself to keep it straight as he slept sitting upright. The quilt was draped over his shoulders like a cape. At some point in the evening he'd been writing, his scrolls spread out in front of him, the characters neat and even though too far to read and she could see no break, it had been going well, and this perhaps was what had made him throw the ink against the wall, where a weal of it lay dark, testament to his frustration.

It was all she needed. She slid the screen shut and ran all the way to the center of the room, not looking around her at the vast expanses of dead floor and empty space. It swallowed her up, the only place in her house now that was close to being what it had been, and it was wrong to feel this way, it must have been, when the three of them slept outside and filled her house, even with the proprietary way they shifted in its floorboards in sleep, with love.

Her parents would never see it, or tell her if it was still the place they had died for. Something was being made but she would never know, with any certainty, if it was being rebuilt.

So she ran. She made it to him without letting herself think of what she was doing, all the way deep into the room where she had never stayed, and then she ducked herself under the quilt, fisting her hand in the fabric at his solar plexus. When she felt him wake and stir beneath her she couldn’t bear it and nearly pulled away. His hand went immediately to her shoulder, steadying her to him while he kept the sword straight, and she let herself match her breathing to his until she grew calm, and he untensed, little by little. He drew his fingers out all along the length of her hair, unbraided for the night. Its length seemed to stymie him and he lost confidence halfway through and dropped it. She seized it and brought it to her cheek and buried her face in his chest.

“It's like it was never a sword school,” she whispered into his robes. “It's like nothing else ever happened here except being happy. Never forget--what was the point of _any_ of this if I forget?”

A moment. There was no moonlight here; she couldn’t see his face. Then his arm flew around her, crushing her to him so tightly she lost her breath for a moment. She clutched him back, white-knuckled. His heartbeat hammered against her cheek. In time it slowed. Shaking, she pulled the quilt tighter around them, and they slept.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The rain and snow of the evenings traded off, the year unsure of the season it wanted. It was a proper rain the next evening. Sleeting silver lines. They all stayed in to watch Makie with her decorative calligraphy, promising to be very quiet. It was worth any amount of difficult promises. If she fought like she was writing--circles and sweeps--she wrote like she was fighting, detonations of discipline, red ink blossoming into bloodstains under a brush held erect as a blade. Rin waited until she finished the steep curve of one of her characters and then laid another fresh sheet in front of her. Hyakurin had been watching so intently she exclaimed a little but Makie merely raised her eyes to Rin's as though expecting the interruption.

The rain through the screen doors skittered like hot oil. There were deep purple shadows on her cheeks in reflection.

"I wanted to ask you to write something else," said Rin. "I wanted to ask you to write the school's signboard. I know you know how to write the name."

"I know how to write it," said Makie.

"What are you talking about?" said Hyakurin.

Magatsu had gotten up and put a hand over her wrist, like she might snap and leap for Makie's ink tray. It was ludicrous. It was laughable, really, the way they were all looking at her like she was the one caught out of place.

"No need," Makie told him. It was the first time she'd spoken directly to him since they'd come to the house. "I have no intention of proclaiming the triumphant return of anything to this house except its daughter."

"I don't need your help," Rin said to him. "You took my father's sword, you were there when--I know you think you're helping. But you're not a friend of this place, any more than _he_ was." He drew back as though slapped. "And this isn't a house." The terror roiled and acquired a bilious edge in her stomach: there. She'd said it. _Help me_ , she thought, as though he could hear her in the divided room. "It's--it's the Asano family's Mutenichi-Ryu dojo. That's what it should have been. And it's not much--help to me, is it, if you don't want to make the kind of decorations I've asked?"

"All right, Rin," said Hyakurin. "That'll do."

"Not you, Hyaku-san." Her fingertips were very still on the fresh sheet of paper; she still looked down and expected to see it shaken violently. All the ink trails gone meandering and then lost. " _Them._ They're here because they want to help me, right? Because of what _they_ were part of _._ So they should help, then, instead of--tricking me like this. Tricking me into forgetting."

A storm brewed on the eastern edge of the horizon. Somewhere at a great distance the earth was plowed up by the rain, its entrails and deep places seeded with the sky and its load of glittering water. Buried in the land, all that treasure that would resurface only in stories, silver and gold. She understood then she had dreamed of another future in the high, far country of Kaga, but the tales of childhood could only embroider themselves deep within the ground, the lowland they'd never broken free of in one lifetime. How those embroideries shone, old fantasies constantly bedecking themselves for a new year and that was what childhood was, hope constantly renewed. That was what the rules of her home had taken from the woman and man in front of her, what they'd given back to her in spite of it. Magatsu's gaze on her was worried and not angry at all but it was guilt she needed there, not kindness, so she felt like she was going to be sick.

Hyakurin moved swiftly to her side and held her across the shoulders. She hadn't been aware of herself leaning further and further over the red calligraphy, the way Anotsu read from his scrolls. Makie wiped one side of her brush and then the other down with two agonizing, precise swipes and then laid it gently on its stand.

"'Tricking' you," she said. "Not helpful. Fortunately, I am not here to be of help to the Mutenichi-Ryu heiress. I write these wishes for my friend, who would not ask this of me. Am I wrong?"

There was a raining rush between her ears, small pieces falling belatedly into place. She had made a grave error in her understanding of boundaries. Two worlds pushing at one another could have been compatible if the differences were minute. Likewise there were easier boundaries between people matched evenly with similar weapons as their Mutenichi-Ryu had mandated, so that circles and sweeps would suffice, easy boundaries drawn between people whose dreams were smaller and resembled one another. But theirs were too different for the shape of their world as it had been, and were now, as it happened, too different for one another as well. In a place that was as it should have been, the calligraphy would never have existed. Magatsu's tall braziers, nothing like he would have ever seen before but that he'd built for her, Anotsu in the divided room and the way he kept her sword from the ground and the soot in sleep, Hyakurin who had no love for the Itto-Ryu at all, at Makie's side, the glances between them that traded back like a slowly stabilizing scale what they'd forfeited, what they still forfeited, by being here.

A surge of sweet, pure despair lanced through Rin then. It was all part of the house, the darkness of the evening outside, the fresh ripples of pain from the epicenter of the soft place in her chest, the rain's silvery, merciless witness. It was all part of the house and there was no way to escape it, now. She was becoming soft on happiness and she was only making the divide stronger, not ridding herself of it at all, nowhere closer to making a choice that would make her home whole.

The terror swirled up in her, all at once.

"No," she gasped, as though she'd been struck. "Makie-san, no. I'm--I'm very sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't want to speak to you that way. I don't want to _ever_ speak to you that way." She dove for Makie's lap and her arms came around her instantly. Those lovely hands detangling her braids from her collar. "Please don't say you're used to it or--everybody talks like that to a failure of a swordswoman, or something! Oh, this is terrible. I don't believe one word of it and you shouldn't believe one word from _me._ You can--you can say any of it tomorrow. Please!"

"Why ever would I, child," said Makie, as though she genuinely wondered this. "But you should understand what you want. _That--_ what you said--is also part of, as you say, how it should have been."

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

 

The rush in her mind hadn't subsided by the time they'd fallen asleep. When she stole past them to the divided room she'd calmed herself, or gone the rest of the small distance to a place where she didn't need calming; she was back in the safety of anger. She nearly knocked over the lantern shouting for him, knowing the wall would swallow up the sound. But he was already awake at the end of the room, sitting with his back against the wall and writing slowly in a tightly wound scroll. 

“Get up,” she said, shaking. “Come on. Hold this, it’s Magatsu’s. Come on, get up! You can still fight, you're still you. Having to practice isn't an insult.”

He paled. "You saw me--"

"That's how I _know you can!_ Form over function, you're in _my_ dojo! You don't need to win! _"_

He wedged a finger in the scroll and looked about for a place marker. Finding none, he reached back, unknotted his own headband, and laid it along the scroll at his stop point before getting to his feet. He handed her the Chinese sword and accepted Magatsu’s Turk from her, asking her to hold it with one hand so he could set his wrist at three spots beneath the blade until he found its equilibrium point. He made a few abortive sweeps as he would have with the axe and then slid fluently into a series of twelve basic transverse cuts that surprised them both. She unsheathed the Chinese sword with a clang and retreated to the end of the room, unable to watch. 

“How do you do things here? First blood?” he asked, then when she didn’t answer offered, “Disarm, then,” and closed half a floorlength between them to settle into a shaky middle defense that hit her at head height. The long opening he was telegraphing should have made her angry, but instead she only felt queasy, as though she’d asked for too much of something when she already knew she was prone to glut herself.

It was a bad sign that he wasn’t talking.

She went for it. She took him at the boozy left-right shambling run she’d seen Manji use to great success but Anotsu didn’t weave to keep straight perspective, only waited for her to reach a knifelength away and then made one of Makie’s smooth pivots as she went past, stabbing at the empty air. As he reached behind her she swept her arm back in a wide arc, hoping to catch his shoulder; he ducked underneath and turned the blade away with curious, painstaking delicacy, whirling her all the way around. “That fool,” she heard him mutter, “and his obstinate stance on sword guards—“ and then with a fearful, deft toss and catch she recognized from when he'd set his axe on the altar, he changed his loose grip to a choke-up that allowed heartstopping diagonal cuts. She rocketed out of the way of one of these and, shocked with pleasure at the dodge, blocked, but it was too late; she saw his eyes narrow as he took the block in stride and followed her blade all the way back to her sword guard with a scrape like blacksmith’s tongs. It sounded like he was sawing a bell in two directly over her head. His eyes opened wide for a moment.

Then there was a wooden clatter as the Turk hit the floor: he’d dropped it to transfer that chokehold to her fingers, her knuckles, then her wrist. “No blade, this will not hurt,” he said, even as she had already wrenched her eyes shut. He placed his foot between hers, bent her as gently over his knee as though they were dancing, and when he began to step back to complete the flip she screamed, “I don’t care if it does. Disarmed—you’re disarmed! Let go of me!”

He did, immediately. He took the Chinese sword from her and sheathed it before returning for the Turk. It had lasted less than ten minutes but they were both breathing hard. He'd clapped his hand over the stump of his arm but she knew it wasn't paining him. He looked furious, or near tears.

“Well done,” he said. “Those are the rules.”

“That’s right, they are!” she exploded. “They’re the rules! And if we have to play by them and _only_ by them, I might win a few more. Quite a few more. I might beat you, because _you_ didn’t train in a place like this, that’s obvious, _you_ would have cut my wrist to make that disarm without any trouble if we were—outside, or in the world, or anywhere but _here_! Hiding from my own _house_ in this room you cut in half so badly I can't even _want_ it back right, that's how badly, and where we'd never _, ever_ have stood at the same time, because of—“

“The rules,” he said coldly.

He stood very still, still in shock. All those years explaining and he hadn’t expected anyone to understand. That was like him, only another helpless and childish orphan though he fancied himself such a strategist. The soft thing in her sent up a sharp peal of pain as though it were a bruise she’d pressed with her finger. She laughed. She was sick of it and sick with it, her insupportable tenderness that could do nothing to rebuild anything, useless when cleaning for the new year should have only ever meant throwing things away.

“And that’s what you were saying.” She kept laughing and then with no real transition she started to cry; it was easy, they weren’t dissimilar motions. Emotions. She didn’t know what she was thinking. “The rules wouldn’t have saved Makie-san or Magatsu or Doa or you, would they? And you knew that part and I didn’t. But you left them behind, and that didn’t save my parents or me or Hyaku-san either, and I. I knew _that_ part, and you didn’t. So you tell me, Anotsu Kagehisa, since between the two of us we know everything there is to know. I rebuilt my house. I don't know how to rebuild my school, but these are the rules, I can't have one without the other,  can I? Now _what do I do with the rules_?”

He stood there and let her cry and looked at her with his cold, stunned eyes as he had in Kaga. They weren’t the same people. The look wasn’t the same. Still, it meant everything just then. They’d looked away from her, all of them, but here he was, the coward who had needed her at the end, and he was looking at her as though he hadn’t fallen into the water and drowned in front of her eyes, or as though something might have changed in the changeless horrible momentum of their lives if she had looked back.

"I don't want to be _no one's daughter_ ," she whispered. "Even after _knowing_. Even after seeing the price it took. I still want to honor it, and I want it to be something that doesn't _hurt_ people. Where do I go, where I can have both?"

“I knew you would ask me,” he said slowly. “And ask me that way, only after you'd reclaimed this place, though you know what it is. And here I am, as muddled as you.” Turning up his open and soft palm towards her. He was smiling like he did when he had lost control of his life. “My desires were undivided once, but you--what a mess you've made of them."

He went to the axe and picked it up, the catch-grip again, the same shock in his eyes from his disarm. At his feet, his books and brushes, all a mess, the wreckages of his attempts, the successes in the scrolls that hurt him so to look at and she understood why now, seeing him shake in the aftermath of the small duel. If you could have done something else--if at any point in your life you could have given your talents to something else--what could you tell the self that had mutilated itself in the service of the path you'd chosen first?

"I should hate you for it.”

She’d always reacted to him most when he went blank, all the agitated surface of him made a mirror in which she already knew what she'd see. She closed the distance quickly and touched him now; this, here, open-palmed. These silent, shattered nights next to him. Her hand went up to cup the back of his neck, arm settling warm across the fine bow of his shoulderblades, and they had both gone tense as wire but face to face, there was no reason to deny that she could look, she could touch as she wanted, her thumb light on his lower lip.

“Say it again,” she said.

“I should hate you,” he said. Helpless. Childish. She wasn’t listening anymore. Her world had narrowed to a glowing, filamented horizon. Here were answers, two worlds just then poised at the edge of the easiest boundary she could possibly draw. There were only a set of small problems to solve. His head was for tugging. The balls of her feet for levering her up. And then they were kissing, open-mouthed and misaligned, as though it was something they'd done all along and the salt of her tears still stinging on her lips as they took it. Their foreheads knocked together hard enough to hurt. He’d wrenched his eyes closed, so she let him rear back, but then with a motion like spreading the sheets to make their mats—a slow, slow, slow unfurling—he drew her back against himself, sealing their bodies together. She touched the hair tied at the back of his neck. She touched his jaw and the jumping pulse in his neck and the corded muscle at his bicep where her head lay in sleep.

He wiped his mouth with his shoulder in the most long-suffering fashion, his eyelashes fluttering against his cheek. Despite everything he was blushing.

“You should stop crying first or it is _very_ salty,” he said plaintively. “But I do not expect you to understand these important details.”She put the knuckle of her fisted hand in the divot between his collarbones, feeling the muscles of his shoulders and chest shift and relax to accommodate her more easily, though she could feel the nervousness rising from him like heat, a potent coppery feeling that elicited a dizziness from her, and that glowing aching softness in her chest. As if in answer he drew his hand firmly up her back, dipped his head in a sort of panicked terror and kissed her on the mouth again, once, twice, lips barely parted, almost chaste, nothing like the savagery of before and so deliberately obvious about what they were doing, without the violence threaded into it, that this time she had to pull away.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
